Songwriting Without Boundaries (18 page)
Read Songwriting Without Boundaries Online
Authors: Pat Pattison
Enthusiastic
flip-flops
:
The Jersey shore boardwalk was filled with the chatter of enthusiastic flip-flops.
Cut-off jeans and a transistor radio, hair teased high like a dark tornado, eyes black and blue with mascara and eye shadow. Her accent sneers out of pink lips, tattoos like veins around her delicate wrists.
I love the picture of balloons scrambling across the lawn.
Susan’s back in “who” writing in her ninety seconds. Thinking of flip-flops chattering turns them into mouths. Neat.
Give it a try.
Good for you. You’ve taken an important step, looking for one of the elements in the collision. It makes you think up a lot of possibilities before you get one that vibrates. Looking for the noun from the quality (adjective) is a pretty interesting search. Another wrinkle coming tomorrow.
DAY #3
FINDING ADJECTIVES
FROM NOUNS
Yesterday I gave you an adjective and asked you to look for a colliding noun. Today, the process is reversed: I’ll give you the noun, and you try to find a colliding adjective.
Again, don’t just grab anything; take your time and look for provocative, productive combinations.
As usual, write a sentence or short paragraph that makes sense of the combination. Then do a ninety-second piece of object writing for each collision, using it as the object.
____________ Furnace
KRISTIN CIFELLI
Hungry
furnace:
The hungry furnace ran nonstop through the dead of winter, consuming natural gas like a marathon runner devours power bars.
Eating up coal, and keeping us warm … running, running, running—tired and running making its own heat in the cold, damp basement, surrounded by cobwebs and empty boxes … sparks flying, creaking stairs down to the basement, winter’s best friend …
Wheezing
furnace:
The silence in my grandfather’s basement was interrupted by the coughs and sputters of the wheezing furnace, lungs full of stale hot air …
Train tracks like scars on the surface of the ping-pong table, dust motes floating through the weak light coming in from the basement transom window, spiders lying in wait in webbed corners, rusty tools and the dented wooden surface, smell of mothballs and old socks …
What does a furnace do? Okay, it consumes energy, it blows hot air. What else consumes energy? People? People consume energy when they’re hungry. Aha! Hungry furnace. What else blows hot air—exhales? Human beings do. When humans are old and worn, their lungs may not be that great. Aha! Wheezing furnace.
Your turn.
____________ Midnight
Angular
midnight:
Angular midnight interjecting, never protesting; time pours itself into this metallic night, reflections from every surface …
Beijing midnight is angular, edges and sides multiplied as in a dark diamond. Food-stands with miniature stools around flip-up tables, meat on sticks fry over red and black coals, by a Uighur man in a white boxy fitted hat. Disco kids with zany silver and gold flash! Tiny giggles wearing tiny skirts, eyes dilated in techno beats, just dipping out and then dipping back in. A work horse hitched to a cart babbles along past it all, unnoticed, back to his peasant village in a wrinkled mountain.
Sable
midnight:
Sable midnight, a velour pullover for the hills.
Dreams of the rusted steel mills and factories once running night and day. Memories of the lake’s miles-long twinkling lights, all steam and smoke at daylight, leaving the sky forever tinted. Men walk with their high-top lunchboxes to welcome work, not privy to black waves hitting sand …
Hot spots: “his peasant village in a wrinkled mountain,”
“
velour pullover for the hills.”
Your turn.
____________ Cottage
Trembling
cottage:
The overgrowth of the forest twined its needy vines around the trembling cottage, squeezing rafter from roof and distorting every right angle.
We arrived with the last few rays of an October afternoon. The cabin looked less like a romantic getaway than a case for backwoods welfare. I imagined that if I exhaled too intensely the whole structure might collapse. But then, perhaps I was the wolf and you the pig, and this was just our way …
Uptight
cottage:
A perfectly manicured lawn, perky white fence and a prim red mailbox separated the uptight cottage from the slovenly condo complex that squatted next door …
Music blares out of car stereo speakers, the old man hikes up his trousers and leans down to prune the roses that line his driveway, he scowls at the children running like sprites through the open fire hydrant …
Andrea draws her adjective,
trembling
, from the verb, to tremble. Adjectives created in this sort of way, by adding
ing
or
ed
to the verb, are called
participles.
Since verbs are the strongest element in language, using them to create adjectives makes for a more potent modifier.
“The slovenly condo complex that squatted next door ….” Yum.
Now, you try.
____________ Hope
Fragile
hope:
Her stance emanates a fragile hope, shoulders sloping and an anxious trembling in her fingers as she petitions the school board for more money.
I feel that surge of anxiety as I stand here in my navy heels and black hose. I know I should have dressed in the natural light of the bedroom rather than fumbling through my top dresser drawer in the dim light of the bedside reading lamp.
