Hi, I'm Laura from YoungWritersWorkshops.com
and I'm going to talk about how to write a ballad. A ballad is a poem but it's also something
that would be suitable to be set to music. A lot of times the way to start writing your
ballad might be to come up with a phrase, or a catch phrase that you want to build upon.
It doesn't have to be the first line of the ballad but it might be something that's repeated
later throughout the ballad. Many ballads rhythm and it's often a four line stanza or
quatrain. You may think of words where you can create a four line stanza with a varying
rhythm scheme, it could be A, B, A, B or A, B, C, A. Play around with it a little bit
and see what you come up with, don't reach to hard for the rhythms but try and find ways
that you can build in a little bit of rhythm into your ballad. Something really important
to consider in a ballad is the meter. You want to make sure that the phrasing allows
you to have lines with the same amount of syllables and that's what makes it feel comfortable.
It's a little jarring or upsetting when things don't have the same meter, where they don't
quite end on the same syllable, you can kind of feel when the end is supposed to come when
you listen to a song or a poem and if that doesn't fall right, it could feel a little
bit upsetting and off. Just to sum it up, some of the things that are important about
writing a ballad are a phrase that can serve as a course, meter that's consistent and some
sort of rhythm scheme and that's how to write a ballad.