Developing Characters
In Songwriting
Finding the voice inside the song.
Every song has a character. From narrative stories to deeply introspective songs, every piece of writing carries a specific voice, emotional perspective, and way of seeing the world. Focusing on making that character more vivid and distinct can strengthen a song in many ways. It can lend gravitas to a subject, sharpen emotional communication, deepen storytelling, and help songs feel more believable and emotionally grounded.
This workshop explores techniques for developing character voice in songwriting through language, emotional perspective, imagery, vernacular, point of view, and storytelling choices. Through discussion, listening examples, writing exercises, and opportunities to workshop material, participants will experiment with ways to make songs feel more human, specific, and emotionally resonant.
Audience
Creating something from nothing involves constructing a framework to communicate your idea most effectively to the listeners. Creating this framework can be daunting, and require many small decisions to get the point across to the audience in a way that is touching and memorable.
One of the primary editing tools I use is to think about the audience for a song. Not in a marketing sense, but as a tool for making artistic decisions. Every song asks different things of its writer. A deeply introspective song might be written for the songwriter themselves. Some folks might write songs for their family members, close friends, dancers, radio listeners, festival audience, or strangers hearing it across the barroom for the first time. Country music, blues, bluegrass, pop music, rock & roll, hip hop, R&B, etc. all have different musical traditions and artistry. Understanding who a song is trying to reach can help clarify countless artistic decisions: structure, imagery, language, rhyme scheme, instrumentation, production, melody, pacing, emotional directness, etc.
Not every song may be meant for every room, and that's okay. A song written for personal reflection may not communicate immediately to a broad audience. Just a community singalong may not aim for deep interior complexity. Neither approach is inherently better than the other. The important thing as a writer is understanding what the song is trying to do and making choices that support that goal. Revision is often the process of bringing those intentions into clearer focus.
The Feelings Wheel
The feelings wheel is a visual tool designed to help people identify and articulate emotions with greater precision. The concept is most closely associated with psychologist Robert Plutchik, who proposed that emotions exist in related families, and vary in intensity much like a color spectrum.
For songwriters the feelings wheel can be especially useful because emotional specificity creates stronger artistic communication. A song about someone feeling sad may remain emotionally broad but a song about feeling ashamed, lonely, or nostalgic can lead to vivid imagery, a more believable character-voice, and more distinct musical choices because each of those feelings has a different "hue" within the emotional "color-spectrum."
Use this wheel to help identify the emotional center of a character, narrator, or song moment. Begin in the center with a broad emotional category, then move outward toward more specific emotional shades. As you explore these emotions, consider how they might affect:
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The vocabulary and imagery of the lyric
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The rhythm and pacing of the language
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The melodic shape and phrasing
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Harmonic tension or resolution
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Instrumentation and arrangement choices
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The perspective and personality of the narrator
This wheel is not intended as a rigid system, but as a creative prompt to help songwriters explore emotional nuance, character voice, and musical decision-making more deeply.
