How to Write like Taylor Swift
Taylor knows her stuff when it comes to writing.
Look, life is too short to pretend you don’t like Taylor Swift.
If I leave you in a room for 2 hours and play Shake It Off on a loop. You will end up humming ‘haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate’ till the next decade.
Because her songs are just so damn hooky.
When Taylor sings, “Marry me, Juliette, you never have to be alone” (Love Story). Thousands of men drop to their knees and pull out a ring.
When she sings about heartbreak, grown up women start to cry.
Taylor knows her stuff when it comes to writing. She picks just the right amount of words that stick in your head and feels good to hear.
She is the first female artist to win Album of the Year four times at the Grammys. She has sold over 200 million albums worldwide and is the only artist since The Beatles to top the Billboard 200 with 5 albums.
Now let’s see what you can learn from her about writing things that hooks millions of people:
1. Start with a Bang
The bang here is the hook. Your first sentence has to be something that keeps your audience reading. The first thing your audience reads or listens has to capture their attention and their heart.
Involve them with the story you’re trying to tell.
Taylor knows this and this is why her songs always start with a bang. She uses specific pronouns that automatically includes the listener in the action (you, we):
We were both young when I first saw you (Love Story)
You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, she’s upset (You Belong With Me)
Nice to meet you, where you’ve been? (Blank Space)
I don’t like your little games (Look What You Made Me Do)
I promise that you’ll never find another like me (ME!)
All of these iconic first verses place the audience right in the middle of the action while speaking directly to them. These songs start telling us a story, but it’s a story about us, and that makes us want to keep listening.
Nobody has to read what you write, so give people a reason to spend time with you by starting with a bang.
2. Write Music.
In Gary Provost’s words, “Don’t just write words. Write music.”
This means your writing should have a rhythm, like in a song. Because when you read something, there’s a little voice in your head that follows the rhythm.
The better rhythm you have, the easier it is for your reader to remember it.
And the easiest way to add rhythm to your writing is to vary sentence length. Use short sentences to make things exciting and quick. Use longer ones to slow it down and let it breathe.
Here’s how Gary Provost described it:
(Thanks David Perell for this insight)
It makes sense for Taylor to write music as she is a songwriter. She has to make her songs memorable. So our focus with writing music is to write memorable stuff.
And if you would like to take a page out of Taylor’s music. See how she uses wordplay to make things stick in your head.
Darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream. (Blank Space)
3. Details. Details. Details.
Taylor’s biggest strength is how specific she gets in her descriptions of moments, places, and sensations. Which is the ancient-old writing advice ‘show, don’t tell.’
Instead of telling you, “this relationship made me constantly anxious because I never knew where it was going,” she makes you feel that anxiety by singing the words:
are we out of the woods yet?
are we in the clear yet?
— Out of The Woods
Instead of saying, “I was doing well after our breakup, but then you called me, and I felt sad again,” she sings:
You call me up again just to break me like a promise
— All Too Well
Instead of “I was lonely and broken, but then you made me feel loved again”, she sings:
And when I felt like I was an old cardigan
Under someone’s bed
You put me on and said I was your favorite
— cardigan
Sol Stein once wrote: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
That feeling is revealed through detail. Make your reader feel the puddle of water in your shoes, the frustration of having your umbrella flip upside down during a thunderstorm, or the way wet clothes hug your body so tightly that you waddle like a penguin.
One thing to keep in mind, don’t let details overshadow what you have to say. You have a story to tell and let details add on to the specifics.
4. Capture Every Idea
Ideas float around you all the time. But they make contact when you are in the shower, on a walk, during conversations or right before you go to sleep. They don’t wait for your invitation.
If you don’t pay attention to them, they won’t think twice before moving on to someone who will.
So the moment you get an idea, WRITE IT DOWN.
Taylor understands this and she never leaves ideas on the table. She has written songs on paper towels in airport bathrooms. If she gets an idea in the middle of the night, she will get up and write it down. No matter how tired she is.
Because she knows, if she doesn’t write it down now, she won’t remember it tomorrow.
Whenever Taylor comes up with a line that feels like it should be a highlighted line or sounds like it’s an interesting observation. She will write it down in a notepad.
This way, she can come back to it later and see if she wanna expand it into a whole song or if it was just a stupid idea.
Not all of your recorded ideas would be great. Some of the ideas would sound amazing when they arrive but when you give it some time and thought, you will realise, ‘Nah, it’s stupid’ and you can delete it or cross it off.
This approach has led to some of Taylor’s biggest hits:
Her breakthrough hit Tim McGraw, came to her during a high school maths class.
Ronan was inspired by a mother's essay about her son having cancer.
tolerate it was inspired by the book Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurie.
So stay open to inspiration all the time and always be looking.
5. Write for Just One Person
Whenever Taylor writes a song, she doesn’t think about thousands of people singing the words to the music. She doesn’t think about whether it will get played on the radio or not.
All she thinks about is the muse she is writing the song about and what they will think when they hear it.
This centers her focus to one person instead of writing to appease everyone.
But that’s just the ‘getting your ideas on paper’ part.
Because after your first draft you have to edit, re-edit, rethink, and re-draft so that it is coherent for anyone who reads it.
Write your heart out in the first draft. Don’t hold back. And then edit it like crazy. Cut out everything that doesn’t help your main message shine.
Think about it: Whoever is going to read your work, they are going to read it alone. So talk directly to that one person.
This is exactly how Taylor’s lyrics strike the perfect balance between generic enough to connect with anyone and specific enough that they do so on a personal level.
6. Read. Read. Read.
Taylor Swift is a voracious reader. She makes "lists and lists and lists" of words she loves — like epiphany and divorcée
Her songs are often based on phrases people say in conversation like, You Need To Calm Down. (You need to calm down)
There is a never ending thread of books recommended by Taylor on X.
Reading gives you tools for your writing. As Stephen King likes to say,
”If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
7. Tap into a Theme
Taylor writes from experiences but she also taps into the universal theme of love that is relevant forever.
Every writer, artist & creator who has played the long game has tapped into a universal theme.
A universal theme is something so constant that as long as humans are present in this world, the word for that theme will be there too.
Words like power, love, obsession, creation, innovation, envy, and rebellion are here to stay and always did.
You can think of them as immortal themes.
As a writer, I tap into the theme of curiosity. All my writeups are driven by curiosity. Did I know all the songs that I mentioned till now?
Hell no!
But this past week, I’ve been listening to her non-stop. Why? Because I wanted to see the bigger picture, to understand how she does what she does.
That’s the power of curiosity — it makes you dig deeper and discover more.
✍️Weekly Writing Prompt
Niharika once shared this weekly journaling prompt which I have found very helpful over the past few months.
Every Saturday at 10 pm I sit down to write:
What went well this week?
What were my challenges? How did I deal with them?
What are my goals ahead of me?
This helps me set the tune for the next week. And make peace with everything that didn’t go right the previous week.
I hope you find this helpful as a weekly or monthly journaling prompt.
📙Book I am Reading this Week
Vada in Theory and Practice is a beautiful book about the role of debates in ancient India and Indian scriptures.
In the Bhagavad Gita; Krishna says,
Of creation I am the beginning and the end and also the middle, O Arjuna. I am spiritual knowledge among the many philosophies, arts and sciences; I am the logic of those who debate.
The attempt with any debate is to seek the truth. In Gita, Krishna isn’t a moral obligator providing rules and regulations for humans to follow. Arjuna asks him questions, Krishna answers. Arjuna cross questions, and Krishna answers again.
This process of truth seeking by questioning feels divine. And the book gives you entirely different perspective on how you should approach certain things.
It gives you an insight into how debates and lectures were held in ancient India.
Thanks for reading till the end! If you have any thoughts to share, I am always here to listen.
Have an awesome week ahead,
Akanksha 🌻