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HookGenius · Songwriting

How to write a song: one song, written start to finish

One sentence in, one finished song out, and every decision in between shown.

Most guides to writing a song give you a list: pick a theme, find a title, write a chorus. Then they stop, and you are back at the blank page with a list. This one does the steps instead. Below is one song, written from a single sentence to a finished lyric, with every decision shown in the order it was made and the reason for it. Read it once, then make the same seven decisions about your own idea.

You do not need an instrument or any music theory for this. Every decision on this page is made in words, and words are enough to carry a song from an idea to something a singer or a music tool can perform.

One thing to know before you start: the song on this page was written by HookGenius, the songwriting app we make. We typed the sentence above into it on 13 October 2026 and changed nothing after. It keeps a record of each decision it makes on the way to a lyric, which is why we can show them. We ran the sentence twice and are showing the second song; what happened to the first is at the end. Where the page quotes the app’s notes, they are quoted as written.

The seven decisions, in order

Notice the order. The singer and the sound are decided before a single line is written, and the title and chorus come late. That is the order this song was made in, and it is a good one to borrow: by the time you write a line, you already know who is saying it and what the room sounds like.

1. Find the song inside the idea
2. Decide who is singing
3. Choose the sound it lives in
4. Decide how the words behave
5. Choose the form
6. Write the title and the chorus
7. Write the verses
8. The finished song, with its performance directions
9. Questions people ask about writing songs

Decision 1 of 7Find the song inside the idea

A subject is not yet a song. “My dad teaching me to drive in an empty parking lot” is a subject: it says what happened. The first decision is what the song is about underneath that, and from where in time it is being told.

Three choices are packed into that note, and each one narrows the song:

• Who is telling it, and when. A grown child, looking back. The lesson is over; what it meant is the news.
• What the lesson stands for. A father who did not talk about love, showing it through patience and correction. The driving is how he says it.
• What the feeling is, and what it is not. “Not nostalgia and not grief.” Ruling feelings out is as useful as naming one. It keeps the song from sliding into the first sad thing that comes to mind.

How do you start a song when all you have is a subject?

Answer the same three questions in one or two sentences. Who is speaking and from when? What does the event stand for? What is the feeling, and which nearby feeling is it not? Until you can answer them, you are still choosing a subject.

Decision 2 of 7Decide who is singing

Before any words, decide whose mouth they come out of. A line that sounds right from a tired man in his forties sounds wrong from a bright teenage voice, even when the words are identical.

In short form, the app recorded the singer as: Male lead vocal, mid-range between light baritone and low tenor. The longer note is the useful one. It never says “sad” or “emotional”. It describes a person: someone who never learned to project because he was always talking to someone close. That one detail tells you how every line should be said, which is quietly, to one person.

A voice that sits a little behind the beat, so the phrases feel remembered, also fits what decision 1 said the song is: a memory being put back together.

Decision 3 of 7Choose the sound it lives in

You can make this decision without playing a note. You are choosing a room for the song to happen in: how fast, how many instruments, how close.

Look at what the note does with the subject. The tempo is given a feeling borrowed from the story: a car rolling forward before the driver finds the gas. And one instrument, the pedal steel, is held back until the final third. That is an arrangement decision made in a sentence. It means the last part of the song will sound different from the first, which matters when you reach the last verse.

Decision 4 of 7Decide how the words behave

This is the decision most guides skip, and the one that makes a lyric sound like one person wrote it. Before writing lines, decide the rules the lines will follow.

Read as rules, that says:

• Short lines. Five to eight syllables, ending before the sentence is finished.
• End on something solid. A plain noun or a short verb.
• Talk to “you”. The song is said to the father, in the second person, the whole way through.
• Things over feelings. Say what was there and what was done.
• Repeat rarely, and on purpose.

Do the lines have to rhyme?

No, and this note does not ask for it. It asks for rhyme that arrives late and is mostly loose. In the finished song the second and fourth lines of each verse end on yet and forget, this and missed, fast and last. Two of those pairs are exact and one is close. The first and third lines of every verse do not rhyme with anything.

Decision 5 of 7Choose the form

Form is which sections the song has, in what order, and what comes back. For this song the app set a lean plan: between 10 and 18 different lines in total, and a chorus that returns whole, word for word, every time. Here is the order it arrived at.

• Verse, 4 lines each
• Chorus, 4 lines each
• No singing: intro, two breaks, outro

That is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, with room for the instruments between each pair. It is the form most people already know by ear. Wikipedia’s entry on verse–chorus form describes it as predominant in rock music since the 1960s.

The whole song is 24 sung lines, and only 14 of them are different from each other. The rest are the chorus coming back.

Does a song need a bridge?

This one has none. A bridge is a section that appears once, late, and says something the verses and chorus have not. Here the third verse does that job, so a bridge would have had nothing left to say. If your last verse only repeats the mood of the first two, a bridge is one way to get the turn the song needs.

How long should a song be?

As long as it takes to make the turn and bring the chorus back after it. This one does it in 81 sung words. A longer story needs more verses. More words do not make a better song, and a song this short leaves a lot of room for the instruments.

Decision 6 of 7Write the title and the chorus

The writer returned the title, the chorus and the verses together in one draft. Take the chorus first, because everything else leans on it.

Four lines, and three of them are the same two words. Three things make it work:

• It is something a person says. “Slow down” is what a father in the passenger seat says to a kid who is going too fast. Nobody has to explain it.
• It has one line that is different. “You got time” sits third, where the ear expects the phrase again. That line is the father being kind, and it is the one you remember.
• It can mean more than one thing. In a car it is an instruction. Said about a life, it is advice. The chorus does not have to say which; the verses decide that.

What is a hook, and how is it different from a chorus?

The chorus is a section. The hook is the smallest piece of the song that sticks, wherever it sits. In this song the hook is two words, “Slow down”, and the chorus is the four-line section built from them. Across the whole song those two words are sung 9 times.

How do you come up with a song title?

The common advice is to take the title from the chorus. This song does something else. The title is “Empty Lot, Full Tank”, and those words are never sung. It names the scene (the empty lot) and what the father left behind (a full tank), and leaves the chorus to do the singing. Either way works. A title from the chorus is easier to remember; a title like this one adds a thought the lyric does not spell out. If you want candidates to react to, the song title generator gives title ideas from a theme.

Decision 7 of 7Write the verses

With the chorus fixed, each verse has one job: to give the chorus something to mean the next time it comes around.

Verse 1 sets the scene without naming it. The sung words never say “dad” or “parking lot”. Two lines, “Ten in the morning” and “Nothing open yet”, tell you the place is empty and why. Then the father speaks for the first time: “You said, put it in D”. A detail that small, the letter on a gear shift, does more than a description would.

Verse 2 shows the father. He demonstrates (“Both hands, like this”), and then he looks out the window. That is the patience from decision 1, shown as something he does. He is not watching for mistakes. The verse never says he trusted the kid.

Verse 3 moves to now, and changes the chorus. “I still hear you say it” and “When I'm going too fast” put the singer in the present. After that, the chorus that follows is no longer about a car. The words are the same as the first two times, and they mean something else. This is the turn the whole song was built to reach, and it is also where the pedal steel from decision 3 comes in.

How do you write a verse?

Give it one job and four lines to do it. Set the scene, or show one thing a person did, or move the clock. Put a real object or a spoken line in it. Check it against your rules from decision 4. Then ask what the chorus means after this verse that it did not mean before. If the answer is nothing, the verse is not finished.

The finished song, with its performance directions

The last pass did not change a word of the lyric. It added directions: what each instrument does in the gaps, and how each section is sung. These sit in square brackets above the lines, the way a music tool such as Suno reads them.

[Intro | fingerpicked acoustic, room ambience, bass settling in]

[Verse 1 | mid-range baritone-tenor, chest-anchored, breath caught before the first word, close-mic, dry]
Ten in the morning
Nothing open yet
You said, put it in D
And don't forget

[Chorus | voice opens a half-step, slap-back catches the room, single take]
Slow down
Slow down
You got time
Slow down

[Instrumental Break | Telecaster fill, brushed snare enters quietly]

[Verse 2 | same close-mic, phrases end near-whispered, breath between lines]
You showed me the wheel
Both hands, like this
Then looked out the window
Like nothing was missed

[Chorus | voice opens a half-step, slap-back catches the room, single take]
Slow down
Slow down
You got time
Slow down

[Groove | pedal steel bends in, bass holds the one, room breathes]

[Verse 3 | weight drops, catch in the breath before the first word, close-mic, dry]
I still hear you say it
When I'm going too fast
Nothing you taught me
Was built not to last

[Chorus | voice opens a half-step, slap-back catches the room, single take]
Slow down
Slow down
You got time
Slow down

[Outro | pedal steel fades, acoustic alone, tape hiss underneath]

[End]

Read the directions on the three verses in order. The first is sung close and dry. The second ends its phrases near a whisper. On the third, “weight drops”. The singer from decision 2 is still the same person, and the directions move him through the song.

The sound, written down

Decisions 2 and 3 end up as one paragraph. This is the description of the record that goes with the lyric: the genre and tempo, the singer, each instrument and what it does, and how it was recorded.

Heartland indie-folk with a soft country lean, 88 BPM, loping behind-the-pocket feel. Male lead vocal, mid-range between light baritone and low tenor, chest-anchored and forward, slightly roughened at the edges from habit, vowels open and flat in an Appalachian Ohio way, sitting a hair behind the beat. Phrases feel remembered rather than performed. No vibrato. Close-mic, minimal processing, touch of room reverb, one short slap-back delay on chorus only. Fingerpicked steel-string acoustic, light bronze strings, faint room ambience. Clean Telecaster back in the mix, occasional chicken-picked fills. Brushed snare, barely there. Short-scale electric bass, fingered, round and thuddy. Pedal steel enters only in the final third, bending in like a long exhale. Cassette-era warmth, dry close-miked production, very slight tape hiss underneath. Tender, unhurried, quietly stunned.

This is where a guide to writing songs stops and a guide to making records begins. Getting a paragraph like that to come out of a music tool the way you meant it is its own skill. In Suno, this paragraph goes in the Styles field and the lyric goes in the Lyrics field; formatting a lyric so it is sung the way you wrote it and the full prompt guide cover the basics for free, and the tag reference lists every bracketed direction.

The paid version is The Suno Mastery Guide. This page teaches the seven decisions on one song. The guide is the depth on the sound: how to write that paragraph for 61 genres, what each tag does, and how to fix a render that ignores you. If you write on a guitar and never plan to use Suno, you do not need it.

The seven decisions as a checklist

Copy this and fill it in for your own idea.

MY SONG
Subject (one line):
1. What it is about underneath, who is telling it, and from when:
2. Who is singing (describe a person):
3. The sound: tempo, 3 or 4 instruments, one thing you would remember:
4. Rules for the lines: length, who it is said to, plain or decorated:
5. Section order, and what repeats exactly:
6. The few words it returns to, and the title:
7. Each verse’s job, and how the last verse changes the chorus:

Questions people ask about writing songs

About the example

We typed the sentence into the live app twice on 13 October 2026, with nothing else set. The first song, “The Way a Hand Holds Still”, came back with three-line verses and a two-line chorus, which was too short to teach from. The second is the one on this page. Nothing in it was edited, shortened or rewritten by hand; the notes quoted under each decision are excerpts of longer notes, in their original words. We have not said how the song sounds as audio, because this page is about the writing. Who makes this explains where the app came from.