Taylor Swift: A Lesson in Writing Craft
Call me basic, call me girly, call me a woman of impeccable taste, but I am a Taylor Swift fan. You don’t have to like her or her music, but I think it’s undeniable that, well, being perhaps the most famous woman in the world at the moment, holding 14 Grammys, and breaking as many records as she has, she must be doing something right. Musicians like to joke that Swift uses the same four chords in all her songs (which a) isn’t completely true, and b) makes her music so accessible to beginning musicians), but she has repeatedly said that what she is most proud of about her songs is her lyrics. And as a writer, lyrics are what most draws me to a song. Taylor Swift is irrevocably an incredible writer and poet, and I think there are some valuable lessons in her lyricism for any aspiring writer… or anyone who likes stories. So here we go, I’m combining two of my favorite things and presenting you with a master class on writing, taught by the one and only Miss Taylor Alison Swift.
Crafting Characters: the “folklore” triangle
“cardigan”
I knew you, steppin’ on the last train,
Marked me like a bloodstain, I
I knew you, tried to change the ending,
Peter losing Wendy, I
I knew you, leavin’ like a father,
Running like water, I
When you are young, they assume you know nothing
It might not be the norm, but having fictional characters in songs is nothing new. But because characters are the backbone of a story, I can’t get enough of character-driven songs. My favorite song for the past few years has been “Cleopatra” by the Lumineers, which tells the story of an old woman the lead singer met in a taxi and frames it around the story of Cleopatra. There are countless more examples, from Stevie Nicks’ “Rhiannon” to Harry Styles’ “Matilda.” So needless to say, when I listened to “folklore” for the first time, I ate it up.
The album is famous for what Taylor has called “the teenage love triangle,” consisting of three characters: Betty, James, and an unnamed third girl whom most people call “August” after the song. Each character has a song from their perspective. In “cardigan,” Betty addresses James, who we later find out left her for another girl and eventually came back to her. The central message of the song is that because she was young, people assumed that Betty didn’t know anything about love, but she claims that she knew James better than anyone and that she knew that he would break her heart and eventually come back to her because that’s who he was. The next song in the triangle is “august,” sung from the perspective of the unnamed third girl. August tells the story of her summer fling with James and her realization that though she was in love with him, she was never “the one”; he was always going to be Betty’s. And finally, “betty” is the song from James’ perspective, as he apologizes to her for what he did and asks if she’ll take him back. Through three songs, Swift crafts three characters who are stumbling through teenage love with real emotions that every teenager has experienced at one point. The characters and their feelings are deeply nuanced, and this is essential for writing characters in stories. A complex story makes us feel many things at once. In “cardigan,” Betty and James have reunited, but the song is almost mournful… is Betty happy that she’s back together with her love, or is she still hurt by what he did? Because it’s a good story, the answer is both.
Swift uses characters in many other songs, but one thing she is also good at is crafting herself as a character. Sometimes, she writes herself honestly and vulnerably, as in “Anti-Hero,” when she lays bare her own insecurities. Sometimes, she writes herself as a larger-than-life caricature as a response to the media’s depiction of her. In “Blank Space,” she paints herself as a love-crazed woman who collects boyfriends for fun, and in “Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?” she criticizes the press by singing as if she is a circus freak, determined to haunt and terrorize her town. Though while writing fiction, we often want to make ourselves as the authors, “disappear behind the curtain,” so to speak, there are times when the character of the author becomes just as important as our characters, particularly in writing nonfiction.
Story and Plot: “no body, no crime”
“no body, no crime” (feat. HAIM)
Este’s a friend of mine
We meet up every Tuesday night for dinner and a glass of wine
Este’s been losing sleep
Her husband’s acting different and it smells like infidelity…
Most songs have some kind of plot structure, but one that is maybe the clearest to follow (and perhaps the most fun) is “no body, no crime,” a true-crime style murder mystery. The song tells the story of the narrator’s friend, Este, who mysteriously disappears after her husband starts cheating on her. The narrator suspects the husband of killing Este and so takes out her revenge by killing him and framing the mistress. Plot wise, the song perfectly follows the standard beats of most stories, which makes it a great model for structuring plot:
Setting the Scene: Verse 1, Este and the narrator meet for their weekly dinner
Inciting Incident: Verse 1/Chorus 1, Este suspects her husband of cheating on her
Break into Act 2: Verse 2, Este murdered
Climax: Bridge, narrator murders the husband
Conclusion: Chorus 3, the mistress framed for the crime
There are more beats for an effective plot, but these are the big ones. Just about every story you will find in books, movies, or in this case, songs, follows this structure. Just as an illustration, here are the same beats for Beauty and the Beast:
Setting the Scene: Belle in her little town, reading voraciously and dreaming of adventure
Inciting Incident: Belle’s father is captured by the Beast
Break into Act 2: Belle takes her father’s place and becomes a prisoner in the Beast’s castle
Climax: Gaston marches the villagers to the castle and “kills” the Beast
Conclusion: True love saves the Beast, and he and Belle live happily ever after
For any writers out there wanting to learn more about plot, I’ve found Brandon Sanderson’s lectures extremely helpful, and as of late, I’ve been doing a deep dive into the “Save the Cat!” beat sheets.
Details, Details, Details: “All Too Well”
“All Too Well” (Taylor’s Version)
Photo album on the counter
Your cheeks were turning red
You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin-sized bed
And your mother’s telling stories ‘bout you on the t-ball team
You told me about your past thinking your future was me
One of my particular stylistic choices as a writer is that I like throwing sporadic details into my stories. I find that this helps the story and characters feel realer to me as I write them, but all writers handle the use of detail differently and not as spastic as I do. But my overall advice is to be specific! Readers don’t connect with generalities; our lives are full of details, however small, however seemingly mundane. Good writers give meaning to the smallest of details, and Taylor Swift does this to absolutely shatter the hearts of her listeners in her break-up songs, especially “All Too Well.” The song is chocked full of detail, even from the opening line, where the narrator leaves her famous “red scarf” at her lover’s sister’s house. Swift goes on to write about “getting lost upstate” on a road trip, “your mother telling stories ‘bout you on the t-ball team,” and “dancing around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” The small details of falling in love build towards the story of the break-up and makes the song all the more devastating. In the 10 minute version of the song, Swift goes on to tell the details of heartbreak, including “weeping in a party bathroom” and watching the front door on her 21st birthday. Listeners connect to the details, and this is what makes the song one of her saddest.
But details don’t have to only be used to make a story sadder; no matter what, specificity makes for good story-telling. In “So High School,” Swift compares her feelings of love to the giddiness she felt in high school, using details like “watching American Pie with you on a Saturday night” and “your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” Even in her earliest songs, Swift was deep in the details: “I was ridin’ shotgun with my hair undone” (“Our Song”) or “You sit in class next to a red-head named Abigail, and soon enough you’re best friends” (“Fifteen”). When in doubt, be specific!
Rewriting Clichés: “Lover”
“Lover”
Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand?
With every guitar string scar on my hand
I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover
My heart’s been borrowed, and yours has been blue
All’s well that ends well to end up with you
I swear to be overdramatic and true to my lover
The easiest way to be a bad writer is to be cliché. Clichés make for lazy writing, but a great way to improve your writing is to take a cliché, something old and overused, and make it new again by developing it. Taylor Swift is a master at this. She frequently uses metaphors or sayings that have been overused and reworks them to have new meaning. “Lover” is a great example, especially the bridge. Swift writes a wedding scene, something that can be greatly overused in stories, but she rewrites all of the cliché wedding imagery. Using the old saying “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” she describes her own heart as “borrowed” and her lover’s as “blue.” Her wedding vow is to remain not only true but “overdramatic,” which is such a unique image that the wedding metaphor suddenly becomes far from cliché.
This is advice that can easily be applied to any kind of writing; if you’re in a tough spot, find a cliché or a familiar image or idea and be creative with it. When Taylor starts a lyric with something familiar and twists it or takes the rest of the line in an unexpected direction, I get goosebumps. For example, in a line that begins with “sittin’ in a tree,” the listener is expecting the old “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” but Swift uses “D-Y-I-N-G” (“How Did It End?”). Or instead of comparing her lover to her “kingdom come,” she finishes the line unexpectedly and turns it into “kingdom come undone” (“hoax”). Don’t let yourself get away with using well-worn sayings and images; be creative with them!
Using Metaphor: “Clean”
“Clean” (Taylor’s Version)
The rain came pouring down
When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe
And by morning
Gone was any trace of you, I think I am finally clean
In many of her songs, Swift takes a metaphor and runs with it. While metaphor is probably a more central element of poetry than of fiction, it can still make for a complex story, and the greatest writers use metaphors that work on many different levels. In “Clean,” Swift compares finally being free of her ex-love as being “clean,” a metaphor that she uses both to mean being washed by water and being sober. The song begins with rain imagery, as she begins the first verse in a “drought,” needing water to wash her stains away. The rain comes in the chorus, and in the second verse, the narrator even goes on to punch a hole in her roof to let in more rain. It seems like this is the central metaphor of the song, but in the bridge, Swift also weaves in the metaphor of sobriety, saying “Ten months sober” and “Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it.” She develops the metaphor so that now it becomes more complex and resonates with the listener on multiple levels.
There are lots of other songs that take a metaphor and develop it over the course of the whole song. In “Wonderland,” Swift compares her relationship to falling down a rabbit hole and going mad like the characters in Alice in Wonderland. In “The Great War,” she compares her relationship to a war, singing about the wounds that she has from the struggle and the hope she holds that they’ll make it if they can only survive the war. In “Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince,” she compares her struggle with the media to being the victim of rumors in a high school. While metaphor can be effective for one line or lyric, it can also be effective for a whole song or a whole scene or even a whole novel. You can choose how deeply you want to develop a metaphor, and the best metaphors become truer the deeper you dig.
I hope this was a fun little writing lesson for anyone interested in storytelling. I’m a firm believer that the best way to learn how to write is by consuming and studying other writers’ work, and while I do read a lot, I’ve also gotten a lot of inspiration from movies and songs. And I promise I have other writers and artists whom I admire who aren’t Taylor Swift, so if you want me to do a deep dive of anyone else’s work, let me know!