Will Fly is absolutely right about writing out words by hand. It does help to fix them in the brain.

Songs that tell a story are easy to memorise; once you've settled on how the story goes and which bits are important, you can learn a ten-minute ballad in a day or so. Songs in which the verses could be sung in any order without impairing the sense - those which simply convey a mood without a narrative, and are properly called lyric, or occasionally self-indulgent tosh - are a bugger. The tradition doesn't contain many of those, possibly because they aren't so readily remembered.

Why should people be able to remember songs they've written themselves? Could you remember the precise words of a letter or a shopping list that you've just written yourself? Making the song up and learning it to sing are completely different activities.

How do actors and barristers commit huge chunks of words and facts to memory for a particular play or case, only to ditch them and learn a fresh set the following week?

Where did my snowman go? What is the sound of one hand clapping? When was the first semi-detached house built? (All credit to The Snail for that one.)

Valmai (Lewes)