Songwriting Without Boundaries (34 page)

I like how Charlie turns his thoughts into commuters: “My thoughts, smiles, to-dos, are all lining up just outside the door of my brain, waiting for the morning commute inbound.” Marvelous!

Your turn. Using
conserving energy
as your linking quality, find your target idea and take ten minutes to explore it through the lens of
sleeping late.

Then reverse it and explore
sleeping late
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

Now try
wasting time
as your linking quality. As usual, when you find your target idea, take ten minutes to explore your target idea through the lens of
sleeping late.
Then reverse it and explore
sleeping late
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

SUSAN CATTANEO

Sleeping late → Linking quality:
Wasting time
→ Target idea:
Surfing the Web

Sleeping late as surfing the Web

Eyes glazed over with sleep, the late morning sun powering up, sheets wrapped like cords around my body, keyboard pattern of sunlight through the squares of the window, the hum of the traffic outside the window, the soft whir of the alarm clock, dreams run on the flat screen of my mind, fingers of memory scrolling through images, there I am at six, standing up my knees in a mud puddle behind our house, a grin as wide as a pumpkin’s on my face, my curls are a tangled mess of bits and bytes, brain clicks “like” …

Surfing the Web as sleeping late

Hands lie over the keyboard, curled on the couch, dazed and catatonic in the blue light of the screen, my slumbering mind moves from page to page, the hours pass like a dream, lazy thoughts come and go, “I should get to bed” surfaces for a moment, but the pull of the Web drags me back down, the laptop rests on the tops of my thighs, heat emanating from its metal skin like a lover’s touch, like an electric blanket …

The two families intermingle, each making visits to the other’s house.
Surfing the Web’s
family brings
powering up, cords, keyboard pattern, hum, whir, flat screen, scrolling, bits and bytes, and clicks and like
to the party. Quite a roomful.

Sleeping late
’s family returns the favor, bringing
BBQ and beer
, as well as an
electric blanket
. Nice, folks.

KEPPIE COUTTS

Sleeping late → Linking quality:
Wasting time
→
Target idea:
A dead-end relationship

A dead-end relationship as sleeping late

I know that I should wake up from this fog, wipe the crust and crumbs from my eyes, and see this for what is really is. But there is a weight, like the warm blanket of blood-red darkness in sleep that keeps me in this myopia, hoping for some revelation like daylight to break through the curtains of dysfunction, and even when I know that your eyes stray, there is the same paralysis of late morning mangled-up dreams, where the mind knows one thing to be true, but the body simply refuses to move.

Reverse it and explore
sleeping late
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

Sleeping late as a dead-end relationship

Warm throbs of sleep like waves on the movie screens of my eyelids; waves that seem to touch my face, cajole me into staying where I am, like a lover’s hands touching my shoulders and rounding to the back of my neck just as I’m about to walk out the door. Things to do, groceries to buy, money to be made, life to be lived, and yet I stay in a shallow seduction. Every extra minute under the bedsheets, head buried in the chest of a pillow, starts to gather the dust of guilt, which compounds the problem, adds extra weight, keeps you there longer … Guilt sprouts tentacles that tangle and wrap, entwine and twist like vines, until you find yourself enmeshed in the very thing that is dragging you down …

Simile is very useful here: “like the warm blanket,” “like a lover’s hands,” and “twist like vines.” As usual, it lets you mention something without committing to it. Plenty of family visiting here.

Your turn. Using
wasting time
as your linking quality, find your target idea and take ten minutes to explore it through the lens of
sleeping late.

Then reverse it and explore
sleeping late
through the lens of your target idea for minutes.

DAY #5

WORKING BOTH DIRECTIONS

Prompt: Broken Glass

Being able to reverse directions—to move in either direction through the linking quality—requires a linking quality that is an essential feature of your first idea. You’ll see more of this process today.

First, list two interesting qualities of
broken glass
:

Unable to be repaired

Glittering and dangerous

Link each to a target idea—the ideas that
broken glass
can be a metaphor for:

What else has that quality? What else is
unable to be repaired?

Now, try this. Supply the target idea for each of the linking qualities. Like yesterday, after you finish your first ten minutes writing about your target idea through the lens of
broken glass,
you’ll change directions and look at
broken glass
through the lens of your target idea.

First, work with
unable to be repaired.

CHARLIE WORSHAM

Broken glass → Linking quality:
Unable to be repaired
→
Target idea:
Broken trust

Broken trust is broken glass.

I watch her words crash through me. Everything I believe in cracks and shatters and lies around me in a pool of silvery shards. I can’t begin to try to pick up the pieces and put them back together. Every time I reach out to her and try to trust again, I feel sharp edges tear into the fingers of my heart. My mind tells me to get a broom and dustpan and just sweep up what’s left of our relationship and dump it into the trash. Trust forms in the heat of a great fire, and the complex melted elements that make up its fragile and beautiful structure are one of a kind every time. Once trust shatters, it destroys all fingerprints. And no tunesmith in the world can mend a break like that.

A very effective expressed identity, “trust is glass,” both in forming and breaking it. It works well, seeing broken trust as broken glass. I love, “Once trust shatters, it destroys all fingerprints.” Read on to see how Charlie turns it around.

Reverse it and explore
broken glass
through the lens of your target idea for ten minutes.

Broken glass is like broken trust.

The screeching tires, the horns screaming wildly, the quick vacuum of air before the thundering impact. The explosion of metal and plastic and rubber and glass thrown into the air and raining down like so many tinkling notes on a toy piano. There lies the bed of clear blue shards on gooey summer pavement. Each dagger of light-catching glass crunches under foot. The driver emerges from the dented, bent-in door, staggers his way to the curb. He might as well have cried tragic confetti instead of the watery tears. That broken glass is the picture of his next four years. Sixteen, a new license, a handshake and a knowing look from father. The pieces of windshield that stick to his shoe and carpet the road will stick with him for who knows how long. He won’t be allowed the chance to avoid this again. The new car will go away, totaled. Any new vehicle will be a shadow of this one. Keys will be like rations of daylight handed to a solitarily confined prisoner for good behavior. What’s broken is broken and lies irreparable, reflecting in jagged fractions of a portrait the sad face of one who has lost his freedom.

The shattering of glass leads to the boy’s losing his father’s trust after a car accident. Charlie puts them together nicely in “The pieces of windshield that stick to his shoe and carpet the road will stick with him for who knows how long.”

SUSAN CATTANEO

Broken glass → Linking quality:
Unable to be repaired
→
Target idea:
Mental illness

Mental illness as broken glass

You lie on the metal bed, wrists and ankles bound in leather straps that cut into your skin, eyes listless and infocused, the doctor stands above you, speaking in soft tones but you only hear shards of his conversation, your thoughts shatter at every word, reflecting a thousand ideas all at once, sharp memories jab you, demanding attention. Your sanity is a cracked window, and you need to see beyond it. This time will be different. This time, there is something to see once you get past the glass. So, you raise a hard boot and feel the delightful sound of your heel on the smooth surface, the swift kick and the tiny fairy wing sound of all those pieces, but there’s only darkness beyond and you.

Look at all the members of
broken glass’
s family are introduced to
mental illness.
Nice motion in this direction. Now Susan turns it around:

Broken glass as mental illness

The window’s shards lie in a catatonic state on the floor, dazed from the feeling of being whole one moment and then shattered the next. Each splinter of glass is crazy sharp, reflecting a thousand distorted images of the same blue sky, a reality only seen in tiny pieces, the cracked wooden frame holds desperately onto a few brittle triangles, a straightjacket of peeling white paint clinging onto these last fragile scraps, but the wood is rotten and the aged white hands slowly surrender the final pieces, they tumble, falling head over heel onto the dark cold pavement.