The Songwriter Forum - songwriting reviews, tips and chat
Songwriter Forum => The Writing Process => Topic started by: adamfarr on October 27, 2021, 09:01:41 AM
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When is a songwriter not a songwriter? When they're not writing songs. I've produced next to nothing since the Spring and have not even felt like it. It's not even a block - it was just not on my radar.
Now I have a few ideas and a bit of drive to start producing something again. At times like this I tend to reach for objectwriting (anyone who has any of Pat Pattinson's books will probably know this). What you do is write for 10 minutes on a random word, trying to use all senses (5 usual ones + "body" + "motion").
Does it produce amazing lyrical gems to slot into your next song? Not really - but it gets the creative side of your brain going and ideas tend to flow much easier when you actually come to write. If you're lucky you may get some usable nuggets, but that's not the point, it's the process that gets you thinking in the right way. I like to include outlandish metaphors and generally just let ideas come, even if dreadful, trying to avoid the obvious.
So I'm going to to this daily for a while using the word that appears at www.objectwriting.com (http://www.objectwriting.com) . I'll post them in this thread for others to see and comment on if you like. Or if anyone wants to join in we can compare notes (best not to look before we've written!).
I'll start off with:
Ladder (10 mins - 25 October)
The yellow rungs have dirty black marks of a hundred steel toed boots, chipped and worn smooth down to the dull gun metal beneath, scratched like sunglasses left for too long in a kitchen drawer.
Black rubber hooves bulge with the weight of steel, human and tools. A springing sound emerges and echoes along pillars of welded scored tubes, grinding against brick where small dusty fingerprints are starting to work their way into the wall smelling like damp paint.
My stomach feels empty in anticipation of a fall that never will come. My fist grips a little too strongly on the side, mistrusting the looseness of gloves which keep skin safe but don't transmit the comfort of contact. My other hand grips a swinging toolbox scraping along the sides and my thigh, tight beneath jeans worn white and smooth with occasional threads picked by sharp-edged hauling.
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Course (10 mins - 26 October)
Chairs scrape along civil service tiles, there is dull conversation but also apprehension of the discomfort of the ignorance and questions to come. The desks are tattooed with years of bored scribbles, fossilized inks from times before our birth, and timeless generic cheap blues, an analog blog. Swirls and letters, insults and names. Carvings of the vey bored that judder under thin paper and interrupt our lazy ballpoint jottings.
An odour of pollution and Mr Sheen taints the air, window sills blackened by time and the traffic grinding past, swinging their homebound spiky headlight beams through to the grey shadowed walls.
Too-bright fluorescent lights compete above, hanging onto regimental squares of off white, punctuated with the disorder of a tile now showing a chink of black space beyond, too-high to fix and curiously ajar by some unknown gale, or worker trying to get home and away from meniality
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Memory (10 mins - 27 October)
Tightness in chest and temples straining to try to dive into the maze of past experience. Eyes dry and burning inside to find a half remembered event and name. Frustration of time, nothing taken but the path overgrown with living.
Silence and pressure of others waiting for memory's engine to rev, for now just churning and bumping around, exploring other doors and finding blockades of musty locks.
I look at my hands, where time has multiplied the paths and dry river beds, cracked like Mars, noodle veins and stains like hairless cats. The air smells cold and the lights are interrogators, holding the gates closed and blurring the colours on the other side.
My feet are heavy with energy that seems to have drained from my brain and shoulders sag as hope fades
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This is fascinating @adamfarr (http://www.songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=20124) and I see that there are already a couple of lyrical gems that have been uncovered :)
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Thanks - it's pretty interesting where the mind goes. I already see that there is some subconscious rhyming going on - (boots - smooth - hooves - tubes; too-bright fluorescent lights - off white - too-high). Definitely potential as a starting point for something. Let's see!
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Great stuff @adamfarr (http://www.songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=20124)
I am also seeing some lyrical gems jumping out
It is interesting that I noted the more “emotional” / feeling responses jump out as lyrical ideas
Particularly:
Tightness in chest and temples straining to try to dive into the maze of past experience. Eyes dry and burning inside to find a half remembered event and name. Frustration of time, nothing taken but the path overgrown with living.
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Hi @Boydie (http://www.songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=18510) thanks - yes I think the idea is to use the senses not just for descriptions but to convey emotions and feelings in an original and relatable way. The inclusion of the "internal" and "motion" senses on top of the others is a nice way to find some new ways to express these things. This has always been helpful whenever I've done it and I am always encouraging others to have a go!
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Demand (10 mins - 28th October)
The envelope is thin and sharp and pristine. A white ticket sitting on the tacky worktop near the microwave with its stubborn dribbles of brown.
The window is a porthole to black lines beneath, innocent characters bounced into service by electrons sent down a banker's network, perfect folds from a computer costing more than my car.
I turn my eyes away from my inevitable name and address. It feels heavy as a 4am and clean as a morgue in my oily fingers. Its whiteness so clean that it clears a vaccinated space through the kitchen odours.
All I hear is my own breath and heart. Not in panic but in resignation and knowledge that the moment has finally come. Perhaps inside there will be no red. Perhaps a reprieve. An error in your favour. Perhaps hope. The PO box number looks at me pityingly knowing that I will have to weaken and with fat fingers or a Poundland knife release it into my world.
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Cycle (10 mins - 31st October - not really feeling it today!)
Ball bearings clacking within their steel houses, the smells of oil and dirt are a workshop's perfume hanging lightly around the shining flashes from the polished wheels.
Silver reflections interrupted by a blur of spokes, tyres gripping the road with the sound of rumbling arrows. Chains click invisibly over sprockets as the pack hits the hill like a mountain storm pausing against the rocks before being whisked upwards in a stream of bouyant wings.
Micron thin jerseys flash their colours, mixed fish trying to untangle themselves and swarm with their own kind. Transparent with sweat, the talking stops as the gradients rise, replaced with energy claps and horsepower yells transmitted from the side of the road.
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I think these are great. I signed up for an object writing word of the day, but I have NOT been following through with the object writing. Rather, I look at the word and then I delete it. No sense saving it for another day as there'll be another word then.
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"Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days" - wow. But OK I'm reviving it for myself! Let's see whether this time it translates into actual songwriting.
Knuckle (10 minutes - 17 May 2022 - a few nuggets here I think!)
Foggy brain, sweat draining like sandpaper into eye sockets. Blinking like cameras. Multitasking to wake up, dodge, shake off the fist hangover, and stay alive.
Not knowing anymore whether anything is blood, sweat or tears, mine or theirs. Not knowing how to punch like in a quicksand dream, arms blocking like coathangers in a gale.
Instinctively forcing fists to cut through the smoke and exhaustion, slapping, scraping, connecting, carpaccio knuckles soaked in salt, like hitting the barbecue time after time, desperate for release but too adrenaline full to run.
Tasting dry fear, tastebuds drunk on lineament. Unsure who the cheers are for, but when they are there then survival is too
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Ghost (10 minutes - 18 May 2022)
Grime on the stairs as time turns solids into liquids; nature is taking back the boards and bricks and even the stones will be forced apart by the smallest grassy root.
Spiders' threads hang like foam, smelling of the grey cold desert. Every step leaves a track in the layers of time fallen like sediment into a foggy river.
Only the wind moves. What's it made of? Nothing, right? But it shuts and opens doors, swings lights, forces window panes into jeopardy and inches the chimney another millimetre down cracked slates.
The ghost drills its way into my living tripe, feeding off the beat of my veins, dragging down my tissues with the sour weight of skinny memories, rotting my bones with its laughing sugar, I am just tubes for it to fill with plump rocks of fear
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Sourdough (10 mins - 19 May 2022)
Quicksand hands are tainted by strings of alien glue; they wriggle and rub and pull and pick but can't get free of the web of sticky sap. The ropes like sharks' teeth sinking back into the mass of gentle moon.
The smell of grandmothers' pantries and bright post-war Summers, the World Service with its cake-tin sound ripples and accents posher than we'll ever be. Bland white marbles and dust, as if from white rubber tyres, now beige with the saltiness of soda and anticipation.
The clank of mixing bowls and wooden spoons, tables creaking with the weight of experienced hands boxing rebellious fibres into submission, fingers being licked and, water rushing to try to separate the dough stuck to my fingers like oil to feathers, tar to a bicycle wheel
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Loving this object writing stuff @adamfarr (http://www.songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=20124) Fascinating
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Aw...there are so many wonderful observations and ideas in this thread...it's a wonder your brain isn't burnt out before you get to pull them together into lyrics.
Inspirationally inventive, from one of the most thoughtful fellas around these parts.
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Hi Adam! What a great way to keep up with... just writing. And also returning to it after a long break!
Your writing has a nice realism to it, really paints a picture. Good work.
I decided to give it a try myself. Not writing but starting as voice memo.
River (4.43 min voice memo - 11 June)
River I don't know where it begins. River more than it seems, I´ve never seen the end.
Clearly I'm not the only one who stands at these strands worried perhaps that there's nothing that will keep me back. The water doesn't look that pure, the water doesn't look like water anymore.
It's only currents.
If time is of the essence, maybe there is time.
The beginning and the end, the slope of the hill. The journey towards the ocean and still. My memories are only a story of the past, a past that I´ve forgotten just won't last. Early I rise, and early I fall. I wonder if I sleep at all.
Trees hanging, resting on the surface yearning.
I close my eyes and I hear buckets of rain.
Feeling Filling a bottomless pit.
The singing stream that I remember was so small, nothing like a river at all.
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Hey @Martinswede (http://www.songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=20851) - so great that you also did one. As you say, writing is always good in whatever way. I find it's really different typing or writing with pen and paper - and probably by voice memo is even different again.
I think your piece has some really interesting lines which could grow up to be parts of a song.
Cheers!
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Ocean (10 mins - 28 June 2022)
Blue is a lie; the density of the opaque deep is a glassy black rock. A rock in angry motion furiously trying to reach the moon with its foamy breath. White beards like acid teeth bubbling and brooding and competing with immobile objects saying Aye, we'll see about that.
The tide smells of the weedy fibres woven into the mouths of mussels, the salt hits the nose like a laboratory of spores, the spray filling the air like viruses singing sweetly to the lungs. Who welcome them in, seduced into moving in sympathy, voluntarily creating our own puny waves in the air.
The light scatters, no freshness in the anchovy mist, tepid stars cutting into the grinding sand.
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@adamfarr (http://www.songwriterforum.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=20124), such an enjoyable thread with some delightful observations. Incredibly well written.
Wicked
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I've not come across this previously. Great idea....with some great ideas included.