Songwriting Without Boundaries

by Pat Pattison

  KAZ MITCHELL: It’s cool inside the church, and the light is gentle as it streams through stained glass. Images of Christ hush the expectant crowd, controlling their small talk to mere mumbles. Someone passes around polo mints to suck while they wait. Children blow steam from their mouths into the cold air, tired of sitting on hard wooden pews next to old aunts in floral dresses and floppy hats. The rising swell of the organ fills the space and silences the whispering. Heads turn to the bride marching down the aisle, her footsteps clipped against the hard, grey stone, a trail of Nina Ricci following her like a puppy. Her nerves jump right out of her skin as she approaches the man standing stiff as a sheet left out to dry in the frost. He, on the other hand, can feel the warmth come seeping back to him knowing she’s finally arrived.

  See how active these are? Both are written in first-person present tense. They involve multiple senses and use metaphor and simile: “puff of dust lassoes my creeping ballet slippers,” “the man standing stiff as a sheet left out to dry in the frost.”

  “Where” is a wonderful tool. Once you decide the place, the rest of your writing can wrap around it or evolve from it. That’s why it’s useful to imagine a place when you write, whether or not you actually talk about it. “Where” organizes action.

  Abstract, generic writing usually lacks the grounding power of “where.”

  Your turn.

  90 seconds: Canoe on the River

  CHRIS COWAN: With its yoke on my shoulders, I stumble under the weight of the canoe. Flipping it into the water, we board, and I kneel in the stern. I use a slow J stroke, noticing the little whirlpools in lapping rhythm. My partner scans for telltale Vs, marking rocks waiting in ambush …

  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 sentenc
e 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:

  ADJECTIVES NOUNS

  Lonely Moonlight

  Blackened Funeral

  Fallen Carburetor

  Smooth Autumn

  Fevered Handkerchief

  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 …

  SUSAN CATTANEO: Hot August sun broils the asphalt, and the limousines line up grill to bumper, charcoal briquettes at a blackened funeral.

  The widow bends over the open grave and drops a white rose into the darkened mouth of earth. Mourners holding tissues close, keen quietly as the dark casket’s holy …

  You’ll be seeing a lot more of Chanelle, too. Note how both she and Susan litter their writing with black—umbrellas, coats, mascara, asphault, charcoal briquettes, and “the darkened mouth of earth.”

  Now, you try.

  Fallen Carburetor

  GREG BECKER: After 43 years of smoking his Marlboro Reds, he grabs his chest in his final moments as his fallen carburetor coughs and chokes out its final breath.

  Deep within his chest the echoes of laughter and a strong young voice bounce off the metallic tar-stained fallen carburetor that once was a pink lung—the carburetor that, in his younger days could take a breath large enough to throw a touchdown pass or blow out the candles on a cake, now just sat rusted within him.

  SUSAN CATTANEO: The preacher’s old station wagon preached a sermon of exhaust as it rumbled downtown, its fallen carburetor backfiring rhetoric.

  Bibles rise precariously like stairs in the passenger seat, the radio tuned to Sunday’s sermon blasts hymn through scratchy speakers, tight white suspenders and a starched white shirt, wedding ring suffocating the puffy left ring finger …

  Pretty interesting: Greg sees a lung as a carburetor, coughing and choking—verbs that work with either lungs or carburetors. And Susan turns the preacher into a car “backfiring rhetoric.”

  Your turn.

  Smooth Autumn

  ANNE HALVORSEN: School bells announce the autumn smooth with old comforts.

  Scent of newly sharp pencils, pristine erasers, top zip cases fitting neatly on notebook rings, snaps of binders pinching fingers as they close over endless white circles licked and placed, reinforcing holes already ripped …

  CHANELLE DAVIS: This was a smooth autumn, yellow leaves slick and dripping with fresh rain, sticking to my boots. The river was swollen and I watched the ducks gliding in pairs, every now and again a quack breaking the misty silence.

  Layers of leaves, sweet rotting smell, squirrels running with wet feet, licking wet fur, cloudy sky, hidden sun, warm hands around a takeaway Starbucks cup, standing in the park rain falling from trees, on my forehead, still air, shiny concrete, washed away chalk hopscotch game, empty playground…

  Hot spots: “School bells announce…”; “yellow leaves slick and dripping with fresh rain.”

  Now, your turn.

  Fevered Handkerchief

  GREG BECKER: After several days of the flu he crawls out of bed no more than a fevered handkerchief with pillow imprints wrinkled into his cheeks.

  Fevered handkerchief is a grumpy rumplestiltskin rag tossed aside after cooling off a sweaty brow, the linen sponge filled with sickness and sweat, thirsty for a cool breeze to dry off its hard night’s work. It lays exhausted in its own pile of success.

  IAN HENCHY: The fevered handkerchief sprinted from the man’s weathered hands to his nose, just in time to catch the volcanic sneeze and keep the bacteria-ridden lava from spewing about the room.

  The virgin-white handkerchief served as his trusty sidekick throughout cold and flu season. It sat, perched like a parrot in the breast pocket of his business blazer for whenever it was needed. It still smelled factory fresh, a slightly abrasive dry-clean smell with soft undertones.

  Pretty interesting handkerchiefs, eh?

  Now write your own version.

  Five down, five to go. The words have been mixed up a bit, and you’ll do the same thing for each new adjective/noun combination., Again, write a sentence, then a ninety-second piece for each collision, using it as the prompt.

  ADJECTIVES NOUNS

  Lonely Handkerchief

  Blackened Autumn

  Fallen Funeral

  Smooth Moonlight

  Fevered Carburetor

  Lonely Handkerchief

  JESS MEIDER: An angel flew from the fingers of a hand in a sin-red BMW convertible, onto the desert ashphalt. A long highway snaking from horizon to horizon, as the lonely handkerchief lies crumpled on the ground, weeping for its circumstance.

  Sitting decoratively in the man’s breast pocket, the handkerchief listens to the conversations intently, waiting for some pretty eyes to press into its neatly pressed corner from laughing so hard that the tears come bubbling up, like the laughter from her sensual belly.

  GREG BECKER: The gowns and tuxedos had all gone home, tossing him aside for the evening, nothing but a lonely handkerchief crumpling into himself, clutching his near empty glass.

  Lonely handkerchief sits crumpled at the bottom of a tuxedo breast jacket pocket; folds of origami crisscross its Picasso face. Smooth silk speaks a different language of touch. No one spoke tonight.

  I love the “sin-red BMW,” and the way Jess personifies the handkerchief. Personification—attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things—is just one of the many ways to make a metaphor. Just another way to create collisions.

  It’s hard to tell in Greg’s sentence whether he’s talking about a person or a
piece of cloth. I like when that happens: Call it “productive ambiguity,” having at least two meanings, and both work in the context. You’ll find that productive ambiguity lies at the heart of metaphor.

  Now, you try.

  Blackened Autumn

  ANNE HALVORSEN: The fire left a blackened autumn, wild flames visible across the great bay.

  Flames stripped the green, ate the flower and vegetable gardens one by one, leapt to gold and red leaves then sucked the trees in its mouth and skipped across the roofs gobbling houses leaving grey looming fireplaces, misshapen unrecognizable pieces of home, then, a swing frame in the sodden yard …

  CHANELLE DAVIS: The children couldn’t see any of the usual bright red or orange leaves. The autumn had been blackened by bushfires that turned red and gold leaves to ash.

  Charcoal trees, stumps, dusty gray ash flakes landing on my coat, floating on raindrops, dark threatening clouds, rumbling thunder …

  Of course, the fires in both pieces blacken things, not the season. So to say that the fire blackened autumn is, like all metaphor, literally false. In fact, if the combination could be true, e.g., blackened handkerchief, then it’s not a metaphor. Again, metaphors are always literally false. That’s what makes them interesting.

  Your turn.

  Fallen Funeral

  IAN HENCHY: Rather than being a celebration of life, it was a fallen funeral—victim to the cause of death: a suicide.

  The surprised casket remained closed, hiding the face that the parents were now so ashamed to display. No red roses surrounded the casket, no floral arrangements. The family seeping silent resentment.

  ANNE HALVORSEN: It was to be an event, a gathering, instead it was a fallen funeral, such a failure as these things go.

  She wrapped the bird in layers of Easter-colored tissue and plastic grass, placed him gently in the shoebox from mother’s closet, and walked grandly to the tall oak, the retriever striding softly at her side …

  Ian’s take on the funeral, which could have been a celebration, has descended into something else. Anne gives a fallen bird a funeral. Nice.

  Now, your turn.

  Smooth Moonlight