We have all seen or been that little kid, standing in front of a full-length mirror, belting along to the radio using the hairbrush as a microphone. (If you are still that little kid, it’s okay; I won’t tell.) Point is, there’s something inside a lot of people that wants to be that pop star. How great would it be to make money by singing the songs that everybody seems to love and know by heart?

But songwriting is too hard, requires actual talent and thought, you say. Wrong! It requires hardly anything at all, and all it requires, I can teach you in one brief article. Today we are going to learn the three steps to writing a cliché song: coming up with a topic, coming up with the lyrics, and coming up with the music.

We’ll start with topic because it actually tends to be the hardest part. You’d think it would be easy, because, I mean, you just have to write about love, right? Everyone can connect to that, right? Well, of course you write a song about love. According to Sheila Davis in her book "The Craft of Lyric Writing," in a study of the 100 most popular songs of all time, “about 85 percent were love songs.” Don’t even try to go with something besides love for a topic; that’d be borderline original and we can’t have that.

No, no, love will do, but what part of love shall we go with? The first initial thrills of infatuation? The heart-wrenching throes of betrayal? The earnest assurances of affection? The exhausted frustrations, the bittersweet goodbyes, the longing for said lover to return? There’s just so many options! All that we need bear in mind is that we can’t have anything too maudlin or outlandish, and we can’t get too fancy because the general populace needs to get what’s going on. We are writing the sonic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting, NOT high-art Picasso. So just pick an aspect of love at random and run with it.

Now that you have a topic, write some lyrics! First important note on this topic: lyrics are not poetry. So if you’re thinking, “Oh, yeah, I’ve written a poem or two; I can do this,” you are already thinking on terms that are far too fancy. Again, we’re looking for Kinkade, not Picasso. Lyrics are more concrete and structured.

But don’t be scared off by the fact that you can’t just dream up a free-verse and call it good. Because I’ll let you in on a little secret about rhyme: you don’t actually have to rhyme. And because we’re writing clichés here, you can use a few pre-made lines to get you started, like, say, “You came into my life/And promised you would stay.” To make this couplet into a whole stanza, just throw on another couplet. The first line can end with whatever you want, as long as the second line ends with “away” or something like that.’ll fit any kind of love situation; all you have to do is fill in the lines between with near-rhyme-ish lines to fit your chosen topic. What for a chorus, you ask? Honestly, you need only rhyme whatever the last line of the stanza a few times, slowly and dramatically, and you’re good.

Once you’ve picked a topic and made some lines from that topic, it’s time to set ‘em to music. If you don’t know music, DON’T PANIC! You don’t need to know anything about music to write it. You just need four chords.

“But what four chords? I don’t know four chords.” Sure you do; everyone does:

So, yes, if you stick with that good ol’ I-V-vi-IV progression, you’ll be just fine.

If you follow these simple instructions, you should have yourself a pop song! All we had to do was pick a topic, throw together some words, and slap them onto that chord progression. With this all under your belt, I am fully confident that you’re ready to go off and start making mainstream hits of your own. Thanks to autotune, you no longer need the ability to sing well, and thanks to this article, you don’t need to write well when you can just use some solid clichés.