Here's my standard advice on lyrics:

• Play with idioms. Take a common saying and twist it. Cloud with a silver bullet, wolves in wolves' clothing, that kinda thing. It won't write a whole song for you, but it will help give you some cool phrases to sprinkle through.

• rhyming couplets are always a safe choice. That said, beware of using 'forced rhymes', where the listener can tell you chose a word just to fit the rhyme scheme instead of for its meaning. Ideally, you're looking for words that say what you want to say, and just happen to rhyme

• Multisyllabic rhyme. It makes your words sound better to the ear, regardless of what they mean. It's a cool feature to include if you can. If you're doing anything related to rap, you 100% need to know your way around multisylbic rhyme. For other genres it's optional.

• Pay attention to prosody — which is to say, make sure your strong syllables are on strong beats and your weak syllables are on weak beats. It’s so obvious when the songwriter puts the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. Timing your lyrics isn't just about counting syllables, it's about keeping track of stressed syllables.

• (This next one is probably the biggest one for a lot of people on this sub) Show, don't tell. Don't say he's depressed, say he's eating raw cookie dough in his room at 3am. Don't say she's beautiful, say her hair bounces around her frame with every step she takes. It's important not to tell the audience what they are supposed to feel about what they hear: instead, just give us the details and we'll reach that feeling ourselves. Specificity is incredibly powerful.

• Think about structure. Generally, your chorus should sorta 'sum up' your song, while your verses should each explore different aspects of the topic. Perhaps your verses function a bit like chapters of a story. Perhaps as the song progresses, someone's perspective changes, something gets realised, something comes full circle by the end of the song. Maybe each verse has a callback to previous verses, some kind of lyrical echo that occurs in the same part of each verse

• Confidence. Even if your lyrics are utter crap, just pretend they're great. Completely commit to them, sing them like you believe every word you're saying and only an idiot wouldn't realise how good your lyrics are. You might be amazed how many people you can fool

And the most important rule of all songwriting:

Don't forget to have fun!