Songwriting Without Boundaries (14 page)

KAZ MITCHELL:
Putting my weight into it, I feel every muscle in my arm ache as I glide through calm, clear waters. A slapping sound, as the oars hit the water, echoes around me. Ducks, in a flurry of panic and noise, get out of the way. I slide past tall, elegant gum trees, pouring out their medicinal scent like I pour out my sweat.

Nice. This canoe trip takes you to the next challenge. Ready to pour out your sweat where rocks wait in ambush? Try it.

Congratulations on finishing your first challenge!

Writing from the senses is such a powerful tool because of the way it involves the readers’ own sense memories, making the world you create
their
world—it’s full of
their
stuff! So the better you get at sense-bound writing, the more effectively you can touch others, not to mention how stimulating and nourishing it is to your own writing process.

I hope you’ve been doing this challenge with partners. Doing so not only keeps you on point, it’s a great way to get to know each other. People do it at home, in professional writers’ rooms, in classrooms, centers for kids at risk, and I’ve even heard of folks using it as an icebreaker at dinner parties: “It changes the level of conversation completely—and for the better!”

The second challenge is looming, and you can dive right in if you’d like. But it might be good to take a few days, or even a few weeks, off. Take the time to digest what you’ve done and make it part of your bloodstream.

Of course, nobody is stopping you from continuing object writing on your own. Or you might go to www.objectwriting.com for the daily prompt there.

Whenever you start the second challenge, just make sure you
do
start it. It’ll change the way you write. I promise.

CHALLENGE #2

METAPHOR

Metaphors have a way of holding
the most truth in the least space.

—ORSON SCOTT CARD

Welcome to Challenge #2. After what you’ve just done, writing from your senses on
who, what, where,
and
when,
this challenge is a natural follow-up. All those specifics you learned to wade into can be even more interesting if they’re not only what they
are
, but become more than they are—they can transform or be transformed if they are seen through the lens of another idea. Added weight. Added meaning.

A metaphor is a collision between ideas, one idea crunched into another—which is itself a metaphor: Metaphors aren’t really collisions, unless you think of ideas as cars, and some of them running into each other, colliding. Then you can think about
ideas
in car terms.

Think of a word like
collision
as establishing a tone center, like a musical key. Some notes belong fully with it. Some have a bit of tension in the relationship, but still belong to the family. These are called “diatonic to” (or related to) the idea. Two ideas collide when they are in different keys, different families, like
idea
and
collision
. A third thing emerges: a chord that contains them both. A metaphor.

So now you start thinking about the things cars do, always looking for things that they could have in common with an
idea.

An idea might be:

Broken down along the roadside (flat tire?)

Ticketed for speeding

Taking the scenic route

Parked in the garage

C’mon, add some of your own. I’ll wait.

People see and use metaphor every day. It’s a truly human activity—seeing one thing as though it were something else—an idea as a car, for example. When you say, “Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses,” you are using metaphor. Stopping to smell a rose is an act— it’s just a moment taken to stimulate your olfactory nerve. But it is used to mean, “Slow down and enjoy yourself. Pay attention to the beauty around you.” Smelling the roses could be cooking a nice dinner, window shopping, holding hands ….

Take a look at types of metaphors, then you can launch into making them. Don’t let the grammatical classifications put you off. It’s easy stuff, really, and very useful, since we all use nouns, verbs, and adjectives pretty regularly.

TYPES OF METAPHOR

Expressed Identity
—asserts an identity between two
nouns
, e.g.,
fear
is a
shadow;
a
cloud
is a
sailing ship
. Expressed identity comes in three forms:

“x is y” (fear is a shadow)

“The y of x” (the shadow of fear)

“x’s y” (fear’s shadow)

EXERCISE:
Run each of these through all three forms:

wind = yelping dog

wind = river

wind = highway

Now come up with a few of your own and run them through all three forms. You might even extend them into longer versions, e.g., clouds are sailing ships on rivers of wind.

Qualifying Metaphor
—adjectives qualify nouns; adverbs qualify verbs. Friction within these relationships creates metaphor, e.g., hasty clouds; to sing blindly.

Verbal Metaphor
—formed by conflict between the verb and its subject and/or object, e.g., clouds sail; he tortured his clutch; frost gobbles summer down.

Aristotle said that the ability to see one thing as another is the only truly creative human act. Most people have the creative spark to make metaphors, they just need to train and direct their energy properly. Look at this metaphor from Shelley’s
Ode to the West Wind
: “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed/One too like thee …”

Hours are links of a chain, accumulating weight and bending the old man’s back lower and lower as each new hour is added. An interesting way to look at old age …

Great metaphors seem to come in a flare of inspiration—there is a moment of light and heat, and suddenly the writer sees the old man bent over, dragging a load of invisible hour-chains. But even if great metaphors come from inspiration, you can certainly prepare yourself for their flaring. Here are some exercises to train your vision; to help you learn to look in the hot places; to help you nurture a spark that can erupt into something bright and wonderful. Have fun.

DAY #1

ADJECTIVE-NOUN COLLISIONS

Okay, here you go. You’ll start with some straightforward exercises that collide grammatical types, nouns with adjectives, nouns with verbs, even nouns with nouns. The goal is to take these arbitrary collisions and explore the ideas these combinations suggest.

You’ll start with adjectives and nouns. Today you’ll have ten prompts, each requiring a sentence or short paragraph and then a ninety-second piece of object writing. A total of fifteen minutes, not counting the thinking and the sentences. Should be easy, eh?

First, you have to sit and think about the collision; try to supply a landscape to make it make sense. That takes a bit of time at first, but you’ll get faster as you go.

Once you’ve made sense of the collision, timed object writing on it will allow you to explore its facets quickly. So you’ll do a ninety-second piece of object writing using the collision as a prompt.

Here are the lists:

Take the first adjective in its list and shove it up against the first noun in the noun list. You get “lonely moonlight.” Where does it take you? Maybe …

Lonely Moonlight

SUSAN CATTANEO:
Daylight hurried away, leaving lonely moonlight to console the solitary oak tree that wept autumn leaves.

90 seconds:
Rickety house stands at attention, its dormers like epaulets on shingle shoulders, keeping vigil over the park. Crumpled up newspapers skip and twirl like batons near the grate at the curb. Silence descends like a hawk. The tart tang of skunk pulls at my nose.

BEN ROMANS:
The moonlight is a lonely wallflower on the waves, waiting for another beam to offer its hand, to ask it to waltz.

90 seconds:
The lonely moonlight listens to the waves, as it pierces the ocean like a needle on vinyl. It plays like a muted trumpet. Boats are a recipe of dust
…

You’ll be seeing a lot of Susan. She’s pretty good at this. She took words that belong to
lonely
, like
forsaken
and, instead of people forsaking each other, “Daylight hurried away, leaving lonely moonlight ….” Personification. Simple. And effective.

And Ben has the moonlight at a school dance …

Susan’s object writing reeks of isolation. She probably got to the house from the oak tree in her sentence. And Ben’s picture of moonlight listening is exciting, and then to move from listening to music? Nice.

Your object writing should use
lonely moonlight
as its prompt, but note how far afield you can go. Anywhere is possible. You just get there through lonely moonlight’s gate. Go ahead. Give it a shot.

Blackened Funeral

CHANELLE DAVIS:
It was a blackened funeral, with hundreds of umbrellas sheltering the people from a typical wet November afternoon as they listened to a prayer being read over the loud speaker …

Long black woolen coats buttoned high and scarves, purple wrapped tight around necks, ushers and rows and rows of blackened people, running mascara down porcelain cheeks, red scarlet lips splash colour like a flick of paint from a brush …