Songwriting Without Boundaries (36 page)

This direction is easier, but look at Scarlet’s simile, “kissing kissing like little knives of rain up and down my body, buckling under the force of you.” It still results in a fresh, interesting look at falling in love. Nice.

Your turn. Using
swept away
as your linking quality, find your target idea and take ten minutes to explore it through the lens of
falling in love.

Now reverse it and explore
falling in love
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

Here we go with
glittering and dangerous:

CAROLINE HARVEY

Falling in love → Linking quality:
Glittering and dangerous
→
Target idea:
Las Vegas

Las Vegas as falling in love

You plunge into it as fast as your wheels will roll you, hurrying to dive into the sparkling chaos, to sink your teeth into the fertile promise of abundance and all that tempting wealth. Your desire to stake your claim, to plant your flag, to be the underworld king in this wild arena of hustlers and go-go dancers shakes you crazy and loose like a flower clinging to the roadside in a windstorm. Your need to win at this gambler’s game that rides up your back like a bucking horse; you’re at the mercy of this beast of compulsion. Inside, once you’ve penetrated the deep inner world and can see the shimmer of lights, taste the pump of fresh oxygen coming in through the secret holes in velvet walls, you slide like a slick snake up to the blackjack table, you lay your golden goods out for all to see, you bet more than you should because you just feel lucky, a single line of sweat forms across your chest as you hold steady and silently beg god to give you one good, sweet surge of victory before it ends.

Yikes! What a sexy view of Las Vegas, the great temptress. Hot spot: “go-go dancers shakes you crazy and loose like a flower clinging to the roadside in a windstorm.”

Falling in love as Las Vegas

It is dawn, it is desert quiet and windless, you are standing just outside the bedroom door. You are inhaling, seizing as much air into your hungry, electric body as you can. Everything in you is preparing for the shock-white neon beam of lightning on the other side of the door, the promise of frenzied, chaotic, rich victory that’s about to bloom up over a mountain of bedsheets and explode you. You know, once you nod your head subtly up and then down, indicate the universal symbol of yes, yes, please, hit me again, you know there won’t be any turning back. You’ll have the best intentions, you’ll tell yourself you’ll only hand over half of your heart, you’ll only saddle up to the high roller table for a little while, only show a few of cards and keep the rest tight to your trapdoor chest. But you won’t be able to stop yourself.

Beautiful turnaround. Note the many Las Vegas family members Caroline invites into the bedroom. Again, a tribute to a strong linking quality, providing your quest for great metaphor with a smooth roadway through the dry desert of infertile options.

SUSAN CATTANEO

Falling in love → Linking quality:
Glittering and dangerous
→ Target idea:
Dagger

Dagger as falling in love

Longing smooth metal, shining warm in the light from a candle, velvet drapes hanging from stone walls, long blond hair tied back with a simple ribbon, breath rising softly from the delicately laced chest, bending over her, hand on the jeweled handle, hand caresses the metal, pulling the blade from the sheath with a gentle movement, the sigh of metal leaving leather, the blade shivering close to the skin, the tiny pinprick making a drop of ruby precious blood, sharp double edge whispering, longing to break the skin open, to sink deeply into muscle and bone, hard metal meeting soft flesh, the blade melting and blood pouring from the wound, warm and welcome, absolution, the sweet smell of perfume and revenge,

Personified in its longing, the dagger drips lust and danger. Scary stuff, brought to you by your friendly sponsor,
glittering and dangerous.

Falling in love is a dagger.

The sweet warm metal of your words, slicing through any and all my defenses, glinting in your light, I am drawn in by my own reflection, my heart is encrusted with precious stones, ruby for passion, emerald for jealousy, the blade sings to me, beckons to come closer, to reach out a delicate finger and run it against the honed edge, I intake sharply as I am pierced, pinned to this love, a butterfly, delicate wings open and lain down on white linen, exposed, a specimen on your wall, caught between your fingertips in the dusk of one summer evening, my colors vibrant and preserved …

I love the secondary expressed identity, “I am pierced, pinned to this love, a butterfly, delicate wings open ….”

Your turn. Using
glittering and dangerous
as your linking quality, find your target idea and take ten minutes to explore it through the lens of
falling in love.

Now reverse it and explore
falling in love
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

DAY #7

WORKING BOTH DIRECTIONS

Prompt: Cheating Lover

This will be the last day of working an idea both ways, and as usual, I will supply the linking qualities. The ability to go deep enough into your idea to find an
essential
linking quality will accelerate your search for effective metaphor.

First, list two interesting qualities of
cheating lover:

Swept away

Dangerous situation

Now link each to a target idea—the ideas that
cheating lover
can be a metaphor for, by asking:

What else has that quality?

SCARLET KEYS

Cheating lover →
Swept away
→ Target idea:
Avalanche

An avalanche is a cheating lover.

You shake the ground burying everything in your path alive. Icy fingers wipe away all that is sacred, like it was lint on your lover’s coat. You have no allegiance; you live for the rush without stopping to think about the wreckage of the aftermath. The lives left breathless, the naked earth that breathes like the dying deer on the side of the road. I watch you slip and slide through shadows and sunlight, around corners and valleys finally to end up in a pile of cold wreckage. You come without a warning; you end with your frosted breath still frigid and more alive for it. You have had the thrill of the rush, I watch and mourn for all that is in your path. The smell of the burn of whirling out of control, the feeling of the ground like a midnight train rumbling and pushing through a sleeping town, clouds hover and twist …

Note Scarlet’s use of direct address, talking directly to the avalanche as though it were a person. Very effective. Again, an effective mingling of the families of both ideas.

A cheating lover is an avalanche.

The unexpected shake in the ground, the feel of a cold sliding beneath my solid feet. I fall, blinded by the blur of heated deceit, covered in disbelief, isolated and suffocated by the choices you’ve made, unstoppable. I am buried alive by grief. When did you first brush up against one another, when did the first quiver or rush just beneath your restless skin begin? The rumbles of what was to come, the moment you collided and the first crack in my trust waited to burst and rupture? The sight of it all is still stuck in my throat, frozen words, shards of crystalized pain that stab and puncture, splinters of the life before and the life after the collapse of the life I’d known. Breathing is slow and cold, Lamaze, blinking back tears, stunned, swallowed in the aftermath, trying to fini …

Direct address again, this time to the cheating lover, “when did the first quiver or rush just beneath your restless skin begin?” Scarlet uses the
avalanche
family to drive home how much damage the lover has done. Great turnaround.

PAT PATTISON

Cheating lover →
Swept away
→ Target idea:
Waterfall

A waterfall is a cheating lover

Murmuring, then plunging over the edge, splashing off rocks slippery, ducking and hiding, in a flash of sunlight, revealing secret places, flotsam from upstream, fool’s gold glittering at the bottom, calling like a lover, dive in, take me up in your hands, cold and dripping. The wind curls and slides, wrapping in mist, cascading to the bottom, foaming like a lace petticoat dropped to the floor, chilling me, warning me away. Whispers of mist dancing, like smoke in a bar, the throbbing of rhythms pounding to the depths, power like a punch …

A cheating lover is a waterfall.

I hear the pounding, insistent, cascading down the stairs, splashing my face like cold water, a power punch to my body, I’m caught in a current pulling, dragging me downward. I’m tumbling, upside down, swept over the edge into the chasm, breathless: breathe! My lungs screaming for air, my heart the size of a basketball, skydiver in the middle of an endless fall to the bottom, a pool of silence. Voices whispering, wet tongues slurring sweaty promises to the dark, the twisted bedspread. Fog rising in my brain. I’m weak and drowning. Lying in a pool that …

Your turn. Using
swept away
as your linking quality, find your target idea and take ten minutes to explore it through the lens of
cheating lover.

Now reverse it and explore
cheating lover
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

Now, here’s a shot at
dangerous situation.
The danger could be to the cheater, risking retribution. The danger could be to the cheated, losing love. A lot of places to go.