by Pat Pattison
smoky
conversation
refried
railroad
decaffeinated
rainbow
hollow
rain forest
understated
eyebrows
Think about each combination for a minute; they evoke some interesting possibilities. Take any combination and try to write a sentence or short paragraph from it. Like this: “Since I got your phone call, everything seems dull. My day has been bleached of sound and color. Even the rainbow this afternoon has been decaffeinated.”
EXERCISE 5
Try writing a sentence or short paragraph for these combinations:
smoky conversation
refried railroad
hollow rain forest
understated eyebrows
Now jumble them up into different combinations (for example, smoky eyebrows) and write a sentence or short paragraph for each one. The point of the exercise is to see that overtones (linking ideas, metaphors) are released by this blind striking of notes. Wonderful accidents happen frequently.
EXERCISE 6
Gather two groups of people. Have each member of one group make an arbitrary list of five interesting verbs. At the same time, have each member of the other group make an arbitrary list of five interesting nouns. Like these:
nouns
verbs
squirrel
preaches
wood stove
vomits
surfboard
cancels
reef
celebrates
aroma
palpitates
Again, take any combination and try to write a sentence or short paragraph from it. Like this: “The red squirrel scrambled onto the branch, rose to his haunches, and began preaching to us, apparently cautioning us to respect the silence of his woodlands.”
Your turn:
wood stove vomits
surfboard cancels
reef celebrates
aroma palpitates
Jumbling up the list unveils new combinations. Write a sentence or short paragraph for each of the following combinations:
squirrel celebrates
wood stove palpitates
surfboard preaches
reef cancels
aroma vomits
If you don't already have a writers' group, these exercises might be a good reason to start one. Just get some people together (even numbers are best) and start making arbitrary lists. Put your lists together and see what your combinations suggest.
One thing will become clear right away: You get better results combining nouns and verbs than from combining adjectives and nouns. Verbs are the power amplifiers of language. They drive it; they set it in motion. Look at any of the great poets — Yeats, Frost, Sexton, Eliot. If you actually go through some poems and circle their verbs, you will see why the poems crackle with power. Great writers know where to look. They pay attention to their verbs.
EXERCISE 7
Have each member of one group make an arbitrary list of five interesting nouns. At the same time, have each member of the other group also make an arbitrary list of five interesting nouns. Like these:
nouns
nouns
summer
Rolls-Royce
ocean
savings account
thesaurus
paintbrush
Indian
beach ball
shipwreck
mattress
Remember the three forms of expressed identity, the first type of metaphor?
Try these noun-noun collisions in each form. For example:
summer is a Rolls-Royce
the Rolls-Royce of summer
summer's Rolls-Royce
Summer is the Rolls-Royce of the seasons.
Winter is gone. Time for another ride in the Rolls-Royce of summer. Once again, summer's Rolls-Royce has collapsed into the iceboat of winter.
Now it's your turn again. Use whatever form of expressed identity metaphor that seems to work best. Write a sentence or short paragraph for the other four noun combinations.
These are also great fun to jumble up. You can even jumble them within the same columns. Try a sentence for each of these:
summer mattress
ocean paintbrush
thesaurus beach ball
Indian Rolls-Royce
shipwreck savings account
EXERCISE 8
After you have spent a few sessions discovering accidental metaphors through the previous exercises, you will be ready for the final method to activate the process: a five-step exercise guaranteed to open your metaphorical eyes and keep them open.
Step one: Make a list of five interesting adjectives. Then, for each one, find an interesting noun that creates a fresh, exciting metaphor. Take as long as you need for each adjective — hours, even days. Keep it in your vision. Push it against every noun you see until you create a breathtaking collision. Be patient. Developing a habit of looking takes time. It is the quality of your metaphors and the accumulated hours of practice that count here, not speed.
Remember that you can make vivid adjectives out of verbs: to wrinkle becomes the adjective wrinkled (wrinkled water) or wrinkling (the wrinkling hours). These are called participles.
Step two: Now make a list of five interesting nouns, and locate a terrific verb for each one. This will be more difficult, since you are used to looking at things in the world, not actions. Again, take your time. Develop a habit of mind that can see a doe stepping through the shallows as the water wrinkles into circles around her.
Step three: Make a list of five interesting verbs and track down a noun for each one. Most likely, you've never looked at the world from this angle before. You'll find it unnatural, challenging, and fun.
Step four: Make a list of five interesting nouns and find an adjective for each one. (Don't forget about participles.)
Step five: Make a list of five interesting nouns and find another noun for each one. Use whatever form of expressed identity metaphor you think works best.
This last step brings you full circle. You have looked at the world from the vantage point of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. (I left out adverbs as a matter of personal preference. I don't get much use out of them, especially when I am careful to find strong verbs. If you want to add them to the exercise, simply list five adverbs and find a verb for each one. Then reverse the process and start with a list of verbs.) This is a practical result: Because you have developed a habit of looking, you will see countless opportunities to create metaphors in your writing. After all, you run into nouns, verbs, and adjectives pretty frequently.
These exercises focus your creative attention on a practical way to find metaphors using expressed identity metaphors, qualifying metaphors, and verbal metaphors. You don't have to wait for a grand bolt of inspiration. Simply look at the word you're on, and ask: What characteristics does this idea have? What else has those characteristics?
Then watch ideas tumble out onto your page.
SIMILE
You learned in high school that the difference between metaphor and simile is that simile uses like or as. True enough, but that's like saying that measles are spots on your body. They are, but if you look deeper, the spots are there because a virus is present. There is something more fundamental going on. Remember the metaphor an army is a rabid wolf? Say it to yourself and let the pictures roll. You start with the army, but your focus transfers to the rabid wolf, something red-eyed and dangerous.
Simile doesn't transfer focus: An army is like a rabid wolf. Say it to yourself and let the pictures roll. The army refuses to budge. No snouts or foamy teeth. We sit waiting for an explanation while the army stands before us in full uniform.
Look at this from Kurt Thompson:
My love is an engine
It ain't run in years
Just took one kiss from you
to loosen up the gears
My heart nee
ds to rev some
It's an old Chevrolet
You might think it's crazy
To want to race away
Who ever said
that love was smart
Baby won't you drive my heart
Won't you drive my heart
The metaphor sets up the car. The speaker is asking baby to get in and step on the accelerator. Now look at this version:
My love's like an engine
It ain't run in years
Just took one kiss from you
to loosen up these gears
My heart needs to rev some
Like an old Chevrolet
You might think it's crazy
To want to race away
Who ever said
that love was smart
Baby won't you drive my heart
Won't you drive my heart
Read it again and let the pictures roll. Now the focus stays on the speaker rather than transferring to the car. So the emphasis in “baby won't you drive my heart” is on heart rather than drive. It seems like a subtle difference, but it makes all the difference in how we hear the song. The metaphor creates a light, clever song. The simile is clever, too, but it's also more intimate, since we stay in the presence of the speaker throughout the song.
Because a simile refuses to transfer focus, it works in a totally different way than a metaphor does. A metaphor takes its second term (an army is a rabid wolf) very seriously — you must commit to it, because that's what everyone will end up looking at.
You needn't commit as deeply to the second term of a simile, since the first term gets most of the attention. This makes similes useful as a one-time event. In a line like “I'm as corny as Kansas in August,” our focus stays on I. We have no further appetite for corn or Kansas. Good thing, since the rest of the song goes everywhere but Kansas. However, if the line had been “I am corn in Kansas in August,” we'd expect to hear things about sun, rain, wind, and harvest in the upcoming lines.
As a rule of thumb, when you have a list of comparisons in mind, use a simile:
love is like rain
love is like planting
love is like the summer sun
When you're using only one comparison (e.g., love is a rose), and you want to commit to it throughout the song, use a metaphor. It only grows when it's on the vine.
CHAPTER FOUR
LEARNING TO SAY NO
BUILDING WORKSHEETS
Writing a lyric is like getting a gig: If you're grateful for any idea that comes along, you're probably not getting the best stuff. But if you have lots of legitimate choices, you won't end up playing six hours in Bangor, Maine, for twenty bucks. Look at it this way: The more often you can say no, the better your gigs get. That's why I suggest that you learn to build a worksheet — a specialized tool for brainstorming that produces bathtubs full of ideas and, at the same time, tailors the ideas specifically for a lyric.
Simply, a worksheet contains two things: a list of key ideas and a list of rhymes for each one. There are three stages to building a worksheet.
1. FOCUS YOUR LYRIC IDEA AS CLEARLY AS YOU CAN
Let's say you want to write about homelessness. Sometimes, you'll start the lyric from an emotion: “That old homeless woman with everything she owns in a shopping cart really touches me. I want to write a song about her.” Sometimes you'll write from a cold, calculated idea: “I'm tired of writing love songs. I want to do one on a serious subject, maybe homelessness.” Or, you may write from a title you like, maybe “Risky Business.” Then the trick is to find an interesting angle on it, perhaps: “What do you do for a living?” “I survive on the streets.” “That's a pretty risky business.”
In each case, it's up to you to find the angle, brainstorm the idea, and create the world the idea will live in. Since you always bring your unique perspective to each experience, you will have something interesting to offer. But you'll have to look at enough ideas to find the best perspective.
Object writing is the key to developing choices. You must dive into your vaults of sense material — those unique and secret places — to find out what images you've stored away, in the present example, around the idea of homelessness.
EXERCISE 9
Stop reading, get out a pen, and dive into homelessness for ten minutes. Stay sense-bound and very specific. How do you connect to the idea? Did you ever get lost in the woods as a child? Run away from home? Sleep in a car in New York?
Now, did you find an expressive image, like a broken wheel on a homeless woman's shopping cart, that can serve as a metaphor — a vehicle to carry your feelings? Did you see some situation, like your parents fighting, that seems to connect you with her situation? These expressive objects or situations are what T.S. Eliot calls “objective correlatives” — objects anyone can touch, smell, and see that correlate with the emotion you want to express. Broken wheels or parents fighting work nicely as objective correlatives.
Even if you find ideas that work well, keep looking a while longer. When you find a good idea, there is usually a bunch more behind it. (The gig opening for Aerosmith could be the next offer.) Jot down your good ideas on a separate sheet of paper.
2. MAKE A LIST OF WORDS THAT EXPRESS YOUR IDEA
You'll need to look further than the hot ideas from your object writing. Get out a thesaurus, one set up according to Roget's original plan according to the flow of ideas — a setup perfect for brainstorming. Dictionary-style versions (set up alphabetically) are useful only for finding synonyms and antonyms. They make brainstorming a cumbersome exercise in cross-referencing.
Your thesaurus is better than a good booking agent. It can churn up images and ideas you wouldn't ever get to by yourself, stimulating your diver to greater and greater depths until a wealth of choices litter the beaches.
Let's adopt the working title “Risky Business” and continue brainstorming the idea of homelessness. In the index (the last half of your thesaurus), locate a word the expresses the general idea, for example, risk. From the list below it, select the word most related to the lyric idea. My thesaurus lists these options for risk: gambling 618n; possibility 469n; danger 661n; speculate 791vb. The first notation should be read as follows: “You will find the word risk in the noun group of section 618 under the key word gambling.”
Key words are always in italics. They set a general meaning for the section, like a key signature sets the tone center in a piece of music.
Probably the closest meaning for our purposes with “Risky Business” is danger 661n. Look in the text (front half) of the thesaurus for section 661 (or whatever number your thesaurus lists; numbers will appear at the tops of the pages). If you peruse the general area around danger for a minute, you will find several pages of related material.
Here are the surrounding section headings in my thesaurus:
Ill health, disease
Insalubrity
Deterioration
Relapse
Bane
Danger
Pitfall
Danger signal
Escape
Salubrity (well-being)
Improvement
Restoration
Remedy
Safety
Refuge. Safeguard
Warning
Preservation
Deliverance
This related material runs for sixteen pages in double-column entries. Risk is totally surrounded by its relatives, so if you look around the neighborhood, you'll find a plethora of possibilities. Start building your list.
Look at these first few entries under danger: N. danger, peril; … shadow of death, jaws of d., dragon's mouth, dangerous situation, unhealthy s., desperate s., forlorn hope 700n. predicament; emergency 137n. crisis; insecurity, jeopardy, risk, hazard, ticklishness…
Look actively. If you take each entry for a quick dive through your sense memories, you should have a host of new ideas within minutes. (Frequent object writing pays big dividends here. The more familiar yo
u are with the process, the quicker these quick dives get. If you are slow at first, don't give up — you'll get faster. Just vow to do more object writing.) Jot down the best words on your list and keep at it until you're into serious overload.
Now the fun begins. Start saying no to words in your list until you've trimmed it to about ten or twelve words with different vowel sounds in their stressed syllables. Put these survivors in the middle of a blank sheet of paper, number them, and enclose them in a box for easy reference later on. Keep these guidelines in mind:
If you are working with a title, be sure to put its key vowel sounds in the list.
Most of your words should end in a stressed syllable, since they work best in rhyming position.
Put any interesting words that duplicate a vowel sound in parentheses.
Your goal is to create a list of words to look up in your rhyming dictionary. Here's what I got banging around in the thesaurus, looking through the lens of homelessness:
risk
business
left out
freeze (wheel, shield)
storm
dull (numb)
night (child)
change
defense
home (hope, broken, coat)
This is not a final list. Don't be afraid to switch, add, or take out words as the process continues.