How Does One Write Filk?

What does it take to write filk.  A lot of work and a second’s inspiration.  At least that is how it works for me.  I can not sing, and I don’t write poetry.  So where does that leave me?  It leaves me a prime candidate to be a filk writer.  J

As I am the only one writing this, I can only tell this from my perspective and experience…

What I need is a spark, a flash of inspiration.  Sometimes that spark can come as a parallel to the words from the original song, sometimes not.  A good example is where we heard the song ‘Do You Believe in Magic’, and a word change came to mind immediately with a turn of ‘Do You Believe in Starships’.  Shirley suggested if we went this route it would have to be a dedication to Roddenberry, which is where we went, and titled it ‘Starships’.  After that it is the grueling effort of making the words go where you want the song to be.

Another time, we were driving back from New Jersey and heard ‘Yellow Submarine’.  I started working with the melody… I heard across the way, they saw Elvis by the Bay...  Oooook.  I could already see where this was going…  But I knew that he’s ok as he was there with JFK...  That immediately said tabloids.  Unfortunately nothing rhymed well with Enquirer.  The basic premise came now when we hit the chorus of… I know its true cause I read it in the Star…

Some times I feel its good (and fun) to pay homage to the original song…

The pictures are so clear,

that they are real, I have no fear.

But the weirdest one I've seen,

is of a yellow submarine.

The flash of inspiration is probably the most key element.  The second is a rhyming dictionary.  After that, it is the work to make what you want to say, work within the same number of syllables.  One flash took us to a song neither of us liked, ‘Achy Breaky Heart’.  We started talking about things, and I got on this track of a poor starship engineer who takes the engines apart and loses this ‘Itty Bitty Part’.  This was one that I felt it was necessary to leave one of the original lines in, thus paying homage to it… You can tell you Ma, we won’t get to Arkansas, We won’t even reach our galaxy…

All in all, it is that once you have the idea, you need to be able to see it through.  Some ideas die because one can’t come up with the words.  Others sit there because of writers block (see ‘Remember the Dream’).  Others just can’t seem to be worked out well enough to be anything.  And yet, others start, but never finish.

Since we are not performing, my filk writing has pretty much stopped, with the occasional exception (see ‘Gnomes on the Range’).  I still have ideas in the back of my tiny little brain that might get completed one day.  I have been playing with the idea of taking ‘Blue Moon’ (the 50’s rock version) and telling the tale of a werewolf.  It would have to be called ‘Full Moon’.  Hey, if you want it, take it.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein , Filk writing ‘is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration’ and of course, a good rhyming dictionary.