As an author or composer, we shouldn’t expect to just sit back and be connected to our ‘current moment flow of inspiration’ unless we’ve been exercising it! Object writing is the writers’ set of bar bells to put us in the zone and keep us prepared for when one of those muse moments comes around. After recently taking a few songwriting classes with Berklee’s music teacher, Pat Pattison, I’ve become a huge fan of object writing. What’s that you might ask?
Essentially, object writing involves choosing a topic, usually a noun, and writing about it for a fixed period of time. This can be five minutes or ten minutes. Ten minutes usually gets you into solid thoughts, so I’d suggest sticking with that at first. The key to successful object writing is to remain as limited by the senses as possible. For example, you might say “I went over the bridge.” But if I really wanted to expand on that, I need to draw the reader, or the listener in the case of a song, into the scene. So you could write something like this;
“As I walked up the slope of the bridge, I started to feel ball bearings in my stomach. I always get a little nervous being so high up, it’s like being on top of a skyscraper. You feel like you’re swaying in the breeze and it makes you feeling like you could almost fall over the edge. There’s also the fear that the whole bridge could come crashing down, like a plane going down in turbulence.” There! That was a little more engaging than “I Drove Over the Bridge,” wasn’t it?
The idea is that we dive into our sensory memory bank to bring the image to life. So what are our senses? There are 5 that we are familiar with, of course, but there are two that are not talked about much. The first five are; Taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell. But what are these other two senses you might ask? Well, there are the sensations that originate in the bodily organs. Notice in the example that “ball bearings move around in my stomach.” I think any of us can associate with how that is, it also gets us over the line instead of tired old ‘butterflies’. So think of your organs as a sense; heart [it was ticking like a grandfather clock]lungs [my lungs were a jackhammer in my chest] liver, stomach, etc
The other missing sense that we use in object writing is our kinesthetic awareness. That is a sensation of motion or movement. Once again from the ‘like a plane going down in turbulence’ example. Think about that feeling when you pass a bump on the road or imagine what it is like to be a feather floating in a warm wind.
Sometimes it’s hard to get the creative engine going, but it’s amazing what you can achieve if you practice regularly. Initially try to stick to the word you have chosen and write anything down, starting is the most important thing! I suggest random selections from the dictionary.
Make your objects things you’re familiar with, and as your confidence builds, start expanding your scope. You could start with a knife, for example, and write about eating, the weight of the knife in your hand which could lead you to what it’s like to cut food, then what it’s like to put food in your mouth. Use as many feelings as you can muster. Ten minutes can dissolve pretty quickly. After a few weeks of writing objects, you might end up moving on to more abstract objects. The term, midnight, for example, which is a bit more challenging, but is still a noun. See where your imagination takes you on that. You might think of a line like “the sound of midnight is me waiting to hear his key in the lock.” This brings me to a final point. When you’re sure you can get your stuff out in ten minutes, give yourself another challenge and try to stick to one direction. For example, at midnight you could focus on the sound;
This midnight sound is the roar of a thousand air conditioners in the city as I lie in bed waiting to hear his key in the door, the sigh of relief when you hear that ka-chunk-a. she is in home