Category: stories

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SONGWRITING MONTH DAY 9: Character Reference Song

It’s the 9th! 9 can be divided by 3.  We’re writing a song today, is what I’m saying.

TODAY’S PROMPT:  Take a well-known character, historical (real) or fictional (fabricated), and reference him or her in a song.

You can choose the point of view.  You can write a first-person song, where “I” is the subject, from your own perspective or the perspective of the character. Like the Johnny Appleseed song, “The Lord is Good to me…”

You can write a song to the character, so that the character is “you” (second person).

You can do what Bruce Springsteen does with the Ghost of Tom Joad, and retell the person’s story in the third person.

Famous examples include:

John Henry & The Battle of Davy Crockett (Traditional)

Candle in the Wind (by Elton John was originally about Marilyn Monroe but got re-appropriated Princess Diana).

Kryptonite (Three Doors Down. Remember? From like 1997?)

Sam Cooke has songs about two of my favorite Bible ladies: the woman at the well (Jesus Gave Me Water) and the bleeding woman who gets healed by touching Jesus’s clothes in a crowd (Hem of His Garment).

Drunken Ira Hayes (Johnny Cash).

Buffalo Bill (Jeff Wilkinson).

Hurricane (Bob Dylan).

Wonderful (is about Stevie Wonder by India Arie).

Sabu (The Elephant Boy–by John Prine).

*Special thanks to my dad for helping me come up with these examples.

SONG OF THE DAY: The Ghost of Tom Joad

Because I love, love, love, The Grapes of Wrath.

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SONGWRITING DAY 6: BALLADS

TODAY’S PROMPT: Write a Ballad

Wikipedia says that a ballad is a narrative set to music.  By that definition, you could have the prompt be simply “Tell a story in a song.”

Before the 19th Century (I’m getting most of my info from the wiki site!), ballads were, as I mentioned in a previous post, a form of HBO-type entertainment.  They spread news stories across oceans, they compelled listeners with riveting suspense.

In the 19th Century, the definition of a ballad became “a slow popular love song.”

So, write a narrative song or a slow popular love song. Up to you! This month is totally your oyster.

I’m going to be working with traditional ballads today, though, because those are some of my favorite songs to sing and write.  I have a special fondness for new music that sounds old.  (This is why the band Over the Rhine tends to be my favorite.)

If you too want to be traditional, make sure you kill someone off in your story and structure the lyrical rhythm to go a little something like this:

BaDAH baDAH baDAH BaDAH

BaDAH baDAH baDAH

BaDAH baDAH baDAH BaDAH

BaDAH baDAH baDAH

And try to have no less than six verses.  The longer it is, the more impressive it is until it gets too long.  But the longer you can hold the audience’s attention with suspense, the higher quality the ballad.

Here’s another challenger: the refrain, in a good ballad, changes meaning in context of the verses.

News stories make good ballads.  Deaths (as previously stated) make good ballads.  Lost love makes good ballads too. Keep it dark, people.

Or don’t.  If you’re not dark and you have no fascination for the old-timey, do this assignment the post-19th Century way and write yourself a powerful (slow) love song.

SONG OF THE DAY: Boots of Spanish Leather

Bob Dylan loved him some ballads.  Here’s one that Norton anthologized as one of the greatest poems of all time.

 

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SONGWRITING MONTH DAY TWO: Roots

TODAY’S PROMPT: learn a song written before 1900.

This site is a fantastic resource.

Once upon a time (hey nonny), I took a rhetoric of song class at Miami of Ohio that alerted me to the fact that our music history (“our” as in “American”) is chock full of songs that tell really dark, complicated stories.  Ballads are the HBO dramas of the past.  We’ve got songs about infanticide (“The Cruel Mother”), songs about murder guilt (“Edward”).  “Mary Hamilton” is a first person account of a woman waiting for public death because she got pregnant by the king and killed the baby. Dark stuff, yo. And really dramatic.

Not all the old songs are dark.  Some of them are about feeling like mack-daddies in a world gone right (“Sittin’ on Top of the World”).  These songs came from overseas and morphed on American soil; their journeys help us understand where we came from and maybe where we’re going.

All the cool kids are doing it, by the way.

Everybody who is anybody knows how to play “Saint James Infirmary.”  I mean, I have my version. So does Janis Joplin, despite the fact that Louie Armstrong is probably the true owner.

Gillian Welch has a fantastic “Make Me Down a Pallet on your Floor.”

These songs are great because you can play them in any setting and not worry about copyrights. Right?

TODAY’S SONG:  “I Wish My Baby Was Born”

I learned about this song in my aforementioned rhetoric of song class. There’s a great version on the COLD MOUNTAIN soundtrack.

This one isn’t Jack White (who is fantastic all over that soundtrack), but it does have the potential to destroy a listener:

Lyrics:

I wish, I wish my baby was born
And sitting on its papa’s knee
And me, poor girl
And me, poor girl, were dead and gone
And the green grass growing o’er my feet
I ain’t ahead, nor never will be
Till the sweet apple grows
On a sour apple tree

But still I hope, But still I hope the time will come
When you and I shall be as one

I wish, I wish my love had died
And sent his soul to wander free
Then we might meet where ravens fly
Let our poor bodies rest in peace

The owl, the owl
Is a lonely bird
It chills my heart
With dread and terror
That someone’s blood
There on his wing
That someone’s blood
There on his feathers.

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Thought for Day 30: Don’t Be That Person

I’m thinking a lot about awareness, lately. Self awareness.  Knowing my flaws, being able to take criticism, and working towards self-improvement.  Of course, as you can tell from the way I’ve been writing these blog posts, I believe that most life wisdom can also be translated into writing wisdom.

If you’ve been in a workshop, you know what it’s like to spend 45 minutes talking about someone’s work and then listening to the author for 15 minutes defend their work against all points of criticism.

Don’t be that person.

It doesn’t matter if the story “actually happened.”

It doesn’t matter if the characters dictated the story in some mystical writing process.

Part of serving the work is improving the work.  A huge part, actually.  I’ve seen writers get slaughtered in workshop and then limp around–I’ve been one of these.  I’ve been slaughtered in workshop and then limped to the bar.  I was less mature then.

It’s a matter of maturity, of course, but an ideal writer already knows what the flaws in the story are before anyone reads the draft.  An ideal writer takes unanticipated criticism home, sleeps on it, and then, when the emotional response has dissipated, re-reads the story to see if the critic is right.

Writers must be ruthless at self-improvement–self-writing-improvement.  A professional chooses story over ego. The critics aren’t always right, but a writer who defends their work to critics is always wrong.

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Thought for Day 28: Strength

If you want to be a writer, you have to be strong.

I have just spent a couple years in what Iyanla Vanzant calls, “The Basement.”  It’s when you feel like a victim.  It’s when you cling to self-destructive people and self-destructive behavior. People walk all over you all the time. The “First Floor” is when you are able to recognize the destruction and start making changes.  I’m on the second floor now, which means I’m learning how be strong.

From the second floor, I can see how living in the basement has affected my writing.  My characters tended to be passive.  The conflicts were unclear–it was hard to tell what the characters wanted.

A good story has a strong character with flaws.  Weak characters with a few glimpses of strength rarely cut it for a good story.  We’ve heard it in workshops again and again: What’s the conflict?  What does the character want? What does the character need to do in order to achieve their desire?

What workshops don’t teach us is that in order to write strong characters, we need to know how to be strong people.

What does strength look like?  It looks like knowing what game you’re playing.

It means you find out the rules for the game you’re playing and follow them.

It means going to work, no matter what.

It means that you don’t get destroyed by destructive criticism.

It means you never give up, never never give up.

It means that you don’t get caught up in other people’s drama that makes you weak.

It means you learn how to adopt a healthy lifestyle that doesn’t contribute to your weakness.

The stronger you are, the stronger your writing will be.  Don’t write characters who are victims.  Don’t be a victim.

To get started, I recommend getting to know Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  Be like Hedwig.  Especially in this song:

 

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Thought for Day 16: Keep the Drama on the Page.

This was my favorite part of Julia Cameron’s THE RIGHT TO WRITE (which I am about to finish after I write this post). She says:

For a writer, personal drama is the drink of creative poison.  For a writer, the willing engagement in power struggles is an act of creative sabotage

(p. 41).

This is the truth.  We are living in world of crazy people–all people are crazy. It’s true! All people are self-absorbed. Especially artists. Especially talented ones. You included. Me included.  That doesn’t mean we have to contribute to the world’s craziness.  Our writing can and should bring order to this–help us process and perhaps contribute to the eradication of all hate and harm by acknowledging hate and harm, by getting a handle on it.  If you must act on drama, journal about it.  Save it for your characters’ conflicts.

We don’t have a choice about whether drama will get into our lives but we can learn how to deal with it before it takes over us and prevents us from writing. Here are three ways we can keep drama from interfering with our work:

1. Do our best to avoid it. 

We can start by being careful how we handle other people–especially in romantic/physical situations.  In all of our relationships, romantic or otherwise, avoiding drama looks like keeping other people’s best interests at heart. Pretty simple.  This doesn’t always work, though. People lie. People keep important information from us.  Even so, a lot of drama can be avoided if we go at the world with our best intentions.

2. Be aware of our own power trips.

Writing can help us acknowledge when we feel powerless.  Sometime we will. This is just going to happen.  But by acknowledging this, we can prevent ourselves from using whatever power we have  to harm others.

Do harm to your characters instead. It will make for a much more interesting story.

3. Rise above criticism.

People are going to say mean things to us, or mean things about our writing. Not all criticism is constructive.  But an important aspect of being a writer is having a thick enough skin to sort through criticism and pull out the constructive stuff.

4. Remember that people are time and energy.

Avoid the ones that waste your time and energy.  That doesn’t mean you have to be mean to them.  (See #1). Be respectful.  Love everyone. Even so, loving everyone doesn’t mean handing over your time and energy for them to sabotage it. Sometimes the most loving thing you can to for a person is to leave them alone to their own devices.  Loving someone sometimes means acknowledging that you can’t fix them. It means letting them learn how to fix themselves after you’ve treated them with your best intentions. Ultimately,  you choose who you spend time with and who you think about.

Got drama? Shake it off. Bring it to God, if you are prone to do such a thing. Acknowledge when you need to ask for forgiveness from folks.  Don’t expect anyone to apologize to you when they have hurt you. No matter what, know that you are bigger, more complex, more beautiful than whatever is trying to get in and sabotage your work.  Ultimately, we decide what to worship (what to give power to).

For more information, listen to David Foster Wallace’s speech to Kenyon College:

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Anthologized

The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (CLAPP) recently anthologized story of mine called “Uncle Sam City” in this book:

It’s a collection of short stories that emphasize setting; the story I wrote was set in Bangkok, Thailand.  Other authors collected include two author-friends of mine from my time in Oxford, Ohio: David Harris Ebenbach, who was, for a short time, a local writer in those parts and Joseph Bates, a resident writer at Miami University who taught one of my grad seminars there.  He was actually the first to workshop “Uncle Sam City,” when I submitted it as “untitled”.  It’s gone through several changes since then.  I’m really honored to be in a book with these two–they are wonderful, imaginative writers and fantastic folks.

Other authors in the collection who I don’t know include:

Jenn Winter, Brandon Tietz, Dan Treadway, Robert Duffer, Heather Skyler, Elva Maxine Beach,  Delphine Pontvieux, Emma Riehle Bohmann and Lorraine Boissoneault.  Traci Kim is the editor.

For information about how to access the collection see this page on the CLAPP Center’s website.

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Meet Rachel Levy

At Miami University of Ohio, I was fortunate enough to meet and study fiction alongside one of the most skilled an imaginative writers out there.  Rachel was known for turning in paragraph-long stories that accomplished more than our thirty-pagers.  I’m excited to share with you her story “Becoming Deer,” which PANK Magazine published in their latest issue.

You can read more of her fiction here:

“Ocean” and “Worms” in issues 2 and 3 of Ghost Ocean

A Turkey Baster is Just like a Penis in Smokelong Quarterly

Smokelong Quarterly also posted an interview with Rachel here

Enjoy!

On a final random note: That image is a from a painting I found by googling “haunted deer”. 😀