Color of Madrona
May 15, 2020
I thought I’d share with you an exercise I like to do every once and a while when the writing isn’t flowing; a sort of stream of consciousness writing game I like to play to get myself out of my head and loosen up.
Step 1:
Make a list of 10 VERBS and 10 NOUNS. The key is to not think.. just start writing the first words that come to mind. List what you see happening outside your window; the items on the table that you’re sitting at. Word tense does not matter. Just write them down - GO!
Step 2:
With each list, randomly number a word between 1 and 10. No number should be repeated in each list.
Step 3:
Now to the fun part. Take each correlating word in each list, starting with #1 and write a line that includes both. (1) ‘settle’ and (1) ‘lines’
I wrote “the lines that settle along the road…” and (2) “take to the shadows that walk alone”. Write in whatever form you want, as poetry or prose. Manipulate the tense, change the order if it feels right, etc. Nothing has to rhyme or even make sense. I’ve written a lot of duds, but the point of this exercise isn’t to make a work of art, but to get the juices flowing. I look at it like my warm up before the workout. Sometimes you find combinations of words you’d never think to pair together that end up being profound, and often times, these exercises lead to songs.
Here is what I came up with.