Saturday 12/08/23

Writing from Prose/Poetry

In 2015 Paul released an album called Radioland from his project The Dark Flowers. Using guest vocalist’s, a theme was needed to give the album coherence. Using Sam Shepard’s book of Americana prose/poetry/short stories which examines the darker side of life in the American Prairies and deserts and the characters who inhabit theses environs Paul gave each collaborator a piece from the book and a piece of music to set it against.

Shelly was the 1st person to take these pieces and write two stand out tracks and it was the beauty of the songs ‘Cellophane Girl’ and ‘When Stars Fall’ that allowed other contributors to see how evocative it could be using prose/poetry to inform a song lyric/mood.

We will be looking at prose/poems/short stories and how it can inform a song lyric. We will also use Motel Chronicles and Shepard’s follow up Hawk Moon as source material

Sunday 13/08/23

 Object Writing 

Object writing is one of the most effective and widely used techniques for creative writing. Whether you are writing a story, a song, or a poem, object writing can be really useful for generating ideas.

To do object writing, you simply pick an object and focus all of your senses on it. It’s important that this object is real, and tangible, not just one that you’ve imagined. Typically, when writing, we only use one of our five senses, so it takes some practice to engage them all. One technique to engage all of your senses is to spend some time solely focusing on one sense at a time. For instance, you can focus on the room you’re in, how does it smell? How does the floor feel under your feet? What can you see in front of you? etc. You can use this technique as a launching point to further explore your senses by diving into hypothetical questions. These questions are an opportunity to engage your creativity, for example, how would the floor feel if it turned to lava? The aim here is to incorporate your sense into your writing as much as possible. The more of the senses you use, the more your writing comes alive!

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