Songwriting Without Boundaries (19 page)

Sharp
hope:
Waiting for him to call, she felt the sharp hope pierce her heart every time the phone rang.

A number scrawled on a beer-soaked napkin, regret burns like a cigarette, tousled sheets on the empty bed, high-heeled shoes tossed on the couch, morning breath and mascara running down …

Hope
is one of those abstract nouns.
Trust, love,
etc., all need something specific to ground them. Both Andrea and Susan give us adjectives with enough spunk to crunch up against an ocean liner like
hope
.

Your turn.

____________ Ghost

SUSAN CATTANEO

Lazy
ghost:
The loose shutter on the house swung back and forth halfheartedly, pushed by the languid hand of a lazy ghost.

Porch sagging like an old woman’s stockings, grass brown and yellow in patches, the old light blue Monte Carlo, tires as flat as deflated old balloons, swallows pitch and yaw like tiny black kites in and out of the eaves …

ANDREA STOLPE

Porcelain
ghost:
Her mother’s support was only a porcelain ghost, kept out of reach on a pedestal and debated whether to exist at all.

My grandmother’s dresser was a sacred place. Old photographs beaten by changing seasons stood in a matronly fashion atop a varnished oak surface. Mothballs and century-old perfume leached into every pore of the wood, every unmentionable underclothing hidden within those drawers. I wondered what people of that generation tucked under their pile of socks
…

These both work, but note that a ghost might be realistically deemed lazy as opposed to active. Not quite a collision. Of course, that ghosts don’t exist helps. They don’t, right?

Rather than a collision of the two terms,
porcelain ghost
seems to refer to a bust or picture of a dead grandfather. Nice overtones, though it feels somewhere between metaphor and euphemism.

Since
ghost
can have human qualities, try unhuman qualities like
brittle
or
wrinkled.
C’mon, you can do it.

DAY #4

NOUN-VERB COLLISIONS

Verbs. You’ve already learned something about them. They’re the most potent force in language. Nouns are inert. They sit there. Adjectives pile on top of them and sit there. Verbs electrify them, propel them, launch them into action. The difference between average and great writing: verbs.

Today you’ll create collisions between verbs and nouns. As on day 1, I’ll give you two lists: a list of nouns and a list of verbs. It’ll be up to you to make something of the collision.

For each noun/verb combination, write a sentence or short paragraph expanding on the association. Of course, adjust the verb’s number and tense to suit the noun and the context.

Then do a ninety-second piece of object writing for each combination, using it as the prompt.

Moonlight Tumbles

LEORA SALO:
Moonlight tumbles through the lace curtains weaving webs on your skin, my fingers as spiders. I like the way your skin crawls under my touch.

Where we once wove the sheetsin tapestry of our life together, the moonlight now is just a stubborn child that tumbles into my bed and will not leave me alone.

JAMES MERENDA:
Moonlight tumbles into the more hidden nooks of the city.

Rolling under the traffic of the clouds, doggedly making its way, twice-reflected, onto the street, weary from its work, it is either romantic, or dying. Perhaps both.

You can feel the collision between nouns and verbs. A verb like
tumble
belongs to a pretty active family, which suggests Lia’s “stubborn child.” Note James’s additional metaphor “the traffic of the clouds.” Nice.

Now, you try.

Funeral Exhales

CHANELLE DAVIS:
The tsunami exhaled a funeral onto the white beach, finally withdrawing to the deep ocean it was born from.

Bodies laying still, twisted like pretzels, some look like they’re sleeping, piles of broken buildings like matchsticks, beached ships, roads ripped apart, black wave overtaking the land …

Andrea Stolpe:
The funeral exhaled the stench of greedy family members waiting to collect on the will.

I couldn’t look at the priest so I studied the bare dirt with sprigs of destitute grass lurching around our shined shoes and morose suit pants. I could feel the eyes digging into my back, my brother’s wife releasing her resentment like an IV drip over twenty years of knowing and hating me …

Note in Chanelle’s response that the noun
funeral
comes after the verb as a direct object, with another noun,
tsunami,
providing the subject. That’s the beauty of noun/verb collisions: The noun can serve either as subject or direct object.

“
Stench
”
belongs to
exhale
’s tone center, while “greedy family members” is in a different key, creating the collision. Nice.

Your turn.

Carburetor Sings

CHANELLE DAVIS:
The carburetor sings as they flee down the open desert highway …

High-pitched drone, revving engine, quickly changing the clutch, high speed, see the needle pass 100, leather seat burning hot on my thigh, arm tanning on the window and hair streaming behind me, open my mouth and let the rushing air dry out my saliva …

JESS MEIDER:
the mechanic “whisperer” turns the motor, it raps and bumps in a strange ghetto rhythm while the fans squeal in delight and the carburetor sings a wavering, sweet sick melody …