Songwriting Without Boundaries (6 page)

SHANE ADAMS:
The preschool kids are a bouquet of flowers playing tag on a baseball field. Their water balloons are rubbery comets bursting like wet tattoos on their delightfully screaming backsides. Diamond patterns of freshly mowed grass shine like a chessboard in the summer afternoon while parents laugh from the sidelines like balloon-filling and knee-bandaging coaches. One of the children, a girl with a kickball-red bathing suit, stops to pick a dandelion. Its white Afro is a sunburst of seeds that she blows towards the sun … but the seeds return like cotton boomerangs and alight in her hair and tickle the ridge of her nose like dainty paratroopers. She tosses the used stem over her tan shoulder like a botanical grenade pin and runs to her mom who brushes her hair back with the swipe of a left hand and a pat to her bottom. From nowhere, sprinklers pop to the surface and strafe the giggling crowd. A hundred hands instantaneously are held out like impotent shields to block the clicking spray as fathers scramble with the folding picnic tables whose Jell-O salads duck and bounce like mandarin orange patients on wooden stretchers. Every child’s legs …

Now, it’s your turn.

90 seconds: Rain Cloud

KAZ MITCHELL:
Out on the moors, thick with bristling heather. Wind hurtles down from the mountains freezing the tip of my nose, carrying with it the damp odour of a storm brewing. Fat rain clouds spreading across the sky blotting out all chance of a …

ADAM FARR:
I feel the sharp cold of the thin air peeling at my face. The moisture clings like to a shared towel that never quite shakes off the damp. My breath is fresh and alive in comparison, pausing to consider the rocky terrain and then swallowed by the exploded ocean.

Try it yourself. I hope that paying attention to your verbs helped your writing today. It’s a surefire way to take your writing to another level instantly.

DAY #5

“WHAT” WRITING

Congratulations for staying on board so far. This is the last day of “what” writing, writing from objects or things, which has been the staple diet of object writers for years and has spawned some pretty remarkable writing. It gives you a place to start and a specific focus for your journey through or from an object.

Set a timer and respond to the following prompts for exactly the time allotted. Stop IMMEDIATELY when the timer goes off

Sight     Sound     Taste     Touch     Smell     Body     Motion

5 minutes: Movie Theater

KAZ MITCHELL:
The rustling of greasy fingers amongst salty popcorn, the sweet smell opening up my memory box to reveal a snaking queue on a balmy summer’s evening. A threadbare carpet greets us as we scamper indoors, the thrill of the movies catching our breath. A constellation of glittering movie stars across the screen …

SHIRLEY TO:
Carefully walking up the stairs, listening to the sticky squeaky sound the bottom of my shoes make with each step, glazed slightly with spilled soda and artificial sweetener, I find my seat and squeeze past the couple who look like they have been stationed in the theater for a long time. I reach for the cloth-covered seat and push it down and slowly slide onto it, it makes a sound like the screws and hinges are complaining of waking them from their sweet dreams. The advertisements are showing, flashing red and green and white light, trying to wake up the stale air in this big room. The air is choked with the smell of popcorn, the fake butter syrup thing that has been lavishly poured onto the little celebration of fireworks of corn. The smell makes me want to vomit. Popcorn, it’s soggy and doesn’t taste like corn. But kettle corn—the crunchy sweetness that explodes in my mouth, waking up my taste buds, my mouth watery. Trailer, deep voice is …

Hot spots: “A constellation of glittering movie stars.” “The air is choked with the smell of popcorn.”

See what you come up with.

10 minutes: Cigar

SUSAN CATTANEO:
As the flames lick their wrinkled feet, smoke like fog rises up and swirls in the air overhead, glasses of cut crystal gleam from the bar, the smell of oiled leather, smoke, and cologne. He leans back against the mud-red leather seat, bow tie tucked like a napkin under his chin. His breath is laced with bourbon and tobacco, the conversation drifts like a raft in the sea of smoke, stock tips slither from his overwet lips as his brain scrambles and stumbles to remember which story he told the wife tonight. Working late or dinner with the client? Confidence pools in his chest like an oil slick. He knows both women wait for him, patient as sheep, longing for the crunch of his tires on gravel in the driveway and the burnt musky smell of cigar on his lips. The wife drowns in neglect, ears impaled with diamonds but her heart is empty and echoing. The girlfriend lies in her spacious bleach white minimalist apartment. A tsunami of boredom washes over her that only his platinum Amex card can staunch.

ANTHONY CESERI:
Watching the end turn bright red as his chest lifts upwards from his deep breath. Then smoke billows out of his mouth, as he removes the cigar and floods the space in front of him. Smoke pouring out past his lips as if a dam burst. The smell clouds the room. You can smell the bitter brown cigar stank in the air. I can almost taste the wet paper on my tongue as I breathe in the cigar-laden air.

When the quieter moments align with another one of his puffs, you can hear the crackling of the brown paper as it’s burned up with another one of his big inhales. The tip gets red again, and then leaves its ashy remains behind. The smoke stings my eyes. They feel as if the insides of my eyelids are dry, and made of sandpaper. Then they start to water.

I imagine what the cigar feels like in his fingers. Warm, and rough to the touch. Leaving a noticeable smell on his hands that won’t come off before multiple showers. But of course he’ll have had more cigars by then anyway … keeping the cycle alive.

Now I watch him take his last puff and smash his stub down into the glass ashtray. Hearing the ashes shift around against the glass as he crushes them down. The butt stands upright, with smoke pouring upward as he walks away.

Look at Susan’s “conversation drifts like a raft in the sea of smoke, stock tips slither from his overwet lips” and Anthony’s “Smoke pouring out past his lips as if a dam burst.” Both writers appeal to multiple senses and soak you in the smoky room.

Now, you try.

90 seconds: Arrow

NELSON BOGART:
Poison-tipped rail of death, smells like the fire it was forged in, flying swiftly into the dark, at the silhouette sitting by the smoking fire, unaware of anything except the snap of a branch and the sound of the bowstring twa …