Last week, I finished drafting a chapter where a character confronts the ghost of their past. This morning, I wrote a bridge for a song exploring the same emotional territory. The process felt identical—only the medium changed.

This isn’t coincidence. Songwriting and storytelling draw from the same creative well, following parallel structures invisible until you work in both.

Narrative Arc: Three Acts in Three Minutes

A novel has three acts: setup, confrontation, resolution. Unfold this over 300 pages.

A song has three acts too: verse, chorus, bridge. Unfold this over three minutes.

The compression is the difference. Where a novel has chapters to develop themes, a song has seconds. Every word carries exponential weight.

Consider the emotional journey:

  • Verse 1 (Setup): Establish the situation, introduce the tension
  • Chorus (Confrontation): State the emotional truth, the core ache
  • Verse 2 (Deepening): Add complexity, new information that reframes verse 1
  • Chorus (Repetition with new meaning): Same words, different emotional resonance
  • Bridge (Climax): Perspective shift, breakthrough, or breaking point
  • Final Chorus (Resolution): Catharsis, acceptance, or open-ended questioning

This is three-act structure compressed. A novel does this across chapters. A song does this across stanzas. The emotional engineering is identical.

Character Development: Who’s Speaking?

In fiction, characters evolve through action and dialogue. In songs, the speaker evolves through lyrical perspective shifts.

A novel might take 50 pages to show a character moving from denial to acceptance. A song does this in the space between verse 2 and the bridge.

Example from a song I’m working on:

Verse 1: “I told myself I’d forget your name / convinced myself I’d moved on” (Denial)

Verse 2: “But every song on the radio / sounds like the one we danced to” (Cracks in the facade)

Bridge: “Maybe forgetting was never the point / maybe I just needed to learn / how to carry you differently” (Acceptance, reframing)

That’s a character arc. In a novel, I’d give this 10,000 words and three chapters. In a song, I give it 120 words and three stanzas. The emotional distance traveled is the same.

Imagery: Show, Don’t Tell

Fiction writing wisdom: “Show, don’t tell.” Use concrete details to evoke emotion, not abstract declarations.

Songwriting wisdom: Same.

Compare these approaches:

Telling (abstract):

  • Novel: “She felt devastated after the breakup.”
  • Song: “I’m so sad / everything reminds me of you”

Showing (concrete):

  • Novel: “She found his toothbrush behind the bathroom mirror three months after he left, bristles still dried with paste.”
  • Song: “Your toothbrush still sits by the sink / I can’t bring myself to throw it away”

The second approach—grounding emotion in physical detail—works across mediums because human brains process concrete images more viscerally than abstract concepts.

Rhythm and Cadence

This is where songwriting teaches fiction writing.

Prose has rhythm. Sentence length varies—short sentences punch. Long sentences, with their embedded clauses and parenthetical asides and meandering digressions, create a different energy, a sense of breathlessness or overwhelming detail. You feel the difference in your body, not just your brain.

Lyrics make this explicit. Syllable count per line creates rhythm before melody enters. Poetry lives between prose and lyrics—structured like lyrics, experienced like prose.

When I write dialogue in fiction, I hear the rhythm. How many syllables per sentence? How much breath before the next beat? Does the character speak in short bursts or long rivers of words?

This rhythm-consciousness comes from songwriting. Lyrics force you to count syllables, feel the meter. That discipline transfers to prose, making dialogue more musical.

Subtext: What’s Not Said

Great songs operate on two levels: the literal (what the words say) and the emotional (what the words evoke).

Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” isn’t literally about a car and a highway. It’s about escape, possibility, youth slipping away, the terror and thrill of committing to another person despite everything. The car is subtext.

Great novels do this too. Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is about abortion, but the word never appears. Subtext carries the weight.

In both mediums, trusting the audience creates power. Say less than you mean. Let listeners/readers fill the gap. Their interpretation becomes part of the work.

The Divergence: Time and Collaboration

Here the mediums split.

Time scale: Novels take months or years to write. Songs take days or weeks. The creative metabolism differs. Novels are long-distance running. Songs are sprints. Both require endurance, but the muscle memory differs.

Collaboration: Songs often involve collaboration (co-writers, producers, musicians). Novels are typically solitary. This changes the creative process fundamentally—songwriting becomes conversation, fiction writing becomes monologue.

Consumption time: Reading a novel takes hours. Listening to a song takes three minutes. Audience engagement differs. A novel can afford slow builds, digressions, tangents. A song can’t. Economy is survival.

Why Do Both?

Because switching mediums refreshes the creative well.

When stuck on a novel chapter, writing a song breaks the logjam. The compression forces clarity—what is this scene really about? Distill it to three stanzas. Suddenly the novelistic version becomes clear.

When stuck on a song, expanding into prose reveals hidden depth. Write the story behind the lyrics. Who is speaking? What happened before this moment? The backstory enriches the song even if it never appears in the lyrics.

The mediums cross-pollinate. Fiction teaches me patience, structure, character depth. Songwriting teaches me economy, rhythm, emotional directness.

The Synthesis

Both arts traffic in human experience compressed into aesthetic form. Both create emotional resonance through careful orchestration of words, structure, rhythm, imagery.

The novelist in me makes better songs—more narrative coherence, stronger character development, clearer emotional arcs.

The songwriter in me makes better novels—tighter prose, more musicality, stronger subtext, better understanding of what to leave out.

The creative process isn’t different across mediums. It’s the same process wearing different clothes. Learn one deeply, and you illuminate the others.

Right now, I’m finishing that novel chapter. The character finally confronts their ghost—through a conversation that feels like a song’s bridge: perspective shift, emotional climax, resolution that’s really another beginning.

Later today, I’ll finish that song. The bridge is nearly there. I just need the right image—something concrete, visual, immediate. Maybe it’s in the chapter I just wrote.

The creative process loops. Storytelling feeds songwriting feeds storytelling. The well never runs dry as long as you keep switching buckets.