A song / How to write it into your novel

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but quoting lyrics in your book might cost you a small fortune - not to mention the palaver of chasing up whoever owns the original copyright to get permission to use them, in the first place. (Unless they're your own lyrics, in which case sticking them in italics is fine.)

Good luck.

See War for the Oaks or some similar book for one way to show lyrics. But note well what arrowqueen says. (If you use the Search function, you'll find the previous discussions on lyrical copyright and fair use.)

JANE007 said:

so i'm not sure that it would cost as much as say an Elton John - Rocketman quote, but still... I don't know that.

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You can safely assume that the cost for quoting any song is going to be very high, and the whole process will be a pain in the rump.

I presume that things might get easier/cheaper if the lyrics belong to your friend's band, or a local band that gigs the bar scene, or someone more popular than that but not exactly heard on radio all over the country. I have an inkling that if I were to write a book that took place in my hometown of New Orleans, and I wanted to quote Cowboy Mouth lyrics, it might be as simple as running into Fred LeBlanc on the Rock Boat Cruise, buying him a drink, and asking very nicely. Maybe.

Having a back-up plan (lyrics you made up, or lyrics that are public domain) is important, in case you don't like the answer, but you never know until you ask.

What's trickier is finding the right channels by which to ask if you don't have a chance to casually converse lyricist. I'm not sure how that would go.

Just spekkerlatin', is all.

The author of The War for the Oaks had sung for years in a semi-pro folk band, and knew lots of people who knew lots of people.

Write some lyrics yourself that fit what the song means to the character and the scene.

I'm with sassandgroove -- write it yourself.

As for putting the lyrics into the text, unless one of your characters is saying or singing the lines (as opposed to hearing it in the background on the radio), I don't think you need quote marks. I have several songs and snippets of songs in my WIP, and I just put them in italics and have them stand alone between paragraphs of prose.

I just found this in a thread about songs setting the mood
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=306687&postcount=7

It is simply brilliant! (I think)

I used to be in a band, and I'm incorporating lyrics from some of my original songs into the story. I asked advice here about how to format it a long time ago and the general advice was that there's no one way to do it. Just be consistent.

The ones I've used, I've broken up like lines of poetry. They are indented further from the regular text, they don't include any punctuation or capitolization, and every line ends with a dash. Of course that was more or less my own invention, but it seems to work pretty well.