5 Lessons in Writing from Taylor Swift

The thing that makes Taylor Swift stand out from others is her songwriting. Whether she is writing with the quill, the fountain pen, or the glitter gel pen, you’re sure to hear masterful use of the English language. That being said, no matter what you’re writing, you could learn a thing or two from the Mastermind. 

1. Write About Your Own Life

One of the most well-known things about Taylor Swift is that she writes songs about her life and experiences. It is something that is often both praised and attacked. The personal touch to every song is what makes them so relatable and so real. The emotions are pure and vulnerable because she experienced them and sat down to write so she could figure them out. She writes about her relationships, her family, her anxiety, her mess ups, her triumphs, her fans, and her dreams.

Writing about your life doesn’t have to mean writing a personal narrative or a diary entry. Put your characters through something similar to what you have gone through so that you can give them your emotions. Maybe have them process those feelings differently, but they will feel real to your reader if they were real to you. People connect to vulnerability, and no one knows better about how something felt to you than you, so use that.

2. Draw Inspiration from Movies and TV

On Swift’s later albums, she has said that she was inspired by shows and movies that she was watching. In a radio interview, she said that the song “Death by a Thousand Cuts” was inspired by the Netflix movie, Someone Great, and that she kept having dreams where she was in the place of the main character.

Next, she sat down to write one of my favorite songs off of the album Lover. During this time, she was in a happy, established relationship and writing one of the most devastating break up songs of her career, all because she took inspiration from the media she was consuming.        

Now, don’t plagiarize characters and storylines, but draw inspiration from them. Write a similar character into your story. Have a different type of character go through a situation like one you saw in a show. Write a poem about how a character in the movie you just watched might be feeling at the climax of the movie. Use what you consume everyday as a prompt

3. Use “The Twist”

Taylor has used this device in many songs, and it shows her roots in country music. She will make the whole song about one thing, and during or right after the bridge, she will flip the story to a new focus. In songs like “The Last Great American Dynasty” and “Never Grow Up”, Swift turns the story towards herself with the line, “and then it was bought by me” and changing “don’t you ever grow up” to “I don’t want to grow up” in the last chorus.

She does similar things in some songs from 1989 like “Out of the Woods” and “Wonderland” where one line reframes the entire story of the song. The song “Out of the Woods” is about a relationship that everyone was watching. It was full of anxiety, people were waiting for it to fail, and it felt like a lot of pressure. So, the line at the end of the bridge saying “the monsters turned out to be just trees” flips the script to a relationship where problems were heightened because of the anxiety, or the problems and fears were all in their heads. This makes the song so much more meaningful and interesting because it wasn’t what we thought.

 In your writing, add the twist. Make a character look back on something that in hindsight makes the reader view the story with a new lens like “Out of the Woods”. Include a document at the end of your novel that explains where the story came from (books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale do this), that give it a twist like “The Last Great American Dynasty”.  It does not have to be a huge moment where it turns out the killer was the main character the whole time or the victim is not really dead, but include a moment in your story that makes it more dynamic, or gives it more depth. Give the reader a second way to view your story.

4. Use Figurative Language

This might seem like an obvious one because of course Taylor uses figurative language and of course so should you. It’s like the basics. However, Taylor might be the master class for figurative language, the metaphors say more than most and are often functioning in more than one way. Take a line from “New Romantics” for example. At the beginning of the chorus Swift sings “Cause baby I could build a castle/ Out of all the bricks they threw at me.” Now I don’t know about you, but this is a metaphor I hadn’t heard before. Taylor is saying not only are people writing and saying things to take me down, like throwing bricks, but there are so many of them that I could build something that would take thousands of bricks.

One of the rarer forms of figurative language that Taylor uses often is called a zeugma. A zeugma is when you use the same word with two different meanings. Some examples in Taylor’s songs are “but you held your pride like you should have held me,” in “The Story of Us”, “the wine is cold like the shoulder that I gave you in the street,” from “Paper Rings”, and “they told me all of my cages were mental so I got wasted like all my potential,” from “this is me trying”.     

 I could fill a book with Taylor Swift’s figurative language uses, but the point is, think about new and interesting ways to use it in your own writing. Make a metaphor showing two things instead of one. Find a form of figurative language that isn’t a simile or alliteration to use, play around with it!

5. Write Constantly

If there is one piece of writing advice that is everywhere, it’s that you should write everyday, no matter what it is that you write. This is advice that I need to take to heart myself, but it is definitely something that Ms. Swift herself employs.

In her Variety “Directors on Directors” interview with Martin McDonagh, Taylor said that at this point in her life, she has never been more active creatively. She said she is constantly writing and that writing inspires more writing, over and over again.

So if you are stuck writing one thing, write something different for a while and then go back, it could inspire you. That is what I am doing writing this post instead of my book.