Working with Lyrical Grammar Fuel: 1980s Harder Rock (Part 2)

 

Freewriting with the random four words for rock poetry.

The goal of this day is just to write whatever first comes to mind for about 10 minutes. Everything will revolve around the random words or words that rhyme.

Freewriting without stopping.

You sent me a card each year. When I play my cards, I win. Shuffling cards is a game of chance. In my hand a deck of cards for the game. My ace card is ready, I'm ready to play.

What's left to do? I left it all behind. It's all left unsaid. Left that town far behind. Left you in my dust. Left with nothing but the cards that I've been delt.

The past moments—past times. The past good times and rides. In a past life I've flied. It's past time for a change.

Never a moment to spare. Never low, never there. We can never reach the other side of the world. We never left our cards from our past life.

Ever present, never there. However, you dare to share. Whenever we reach for that moment, a moment to care.

Whoever left a heart once blind, past times unaware.

In one regard, the past is the future, never left answered prayer.

Guard the chance of one moment.

Despised theft, not a chance, never trustin' a troll.

Blast that one on his ass. Never good never real.

Outlast the stealer of souls—an outcast.

Blew it all very fast, on the last one to stare.

The silence raises the night from the first to the last.

That's enough for this day's exercise. In the next one, I might try look over this exercise and pick out whatever might be interesting.

Learning about Poetry (part 8): New material for Poetic Images exercises

For this post, I want to move from the chapter 1 on Muses to the chapter 3 on Images in the Open Textbook on poetry Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations.
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/naming-the-unnameable-an-approach-to-poetry-for-new-generations

The original content and poetry research on this page is by Ken Wickham.

This poetry research is property of Ken Wickham written for World of the Fifth Sun blogster by Ken Wickham. It is readable by visitors to this website location only—not as a PDF, HTML, JavaScript, nor program. It is intended in this version and future versions, to help bring website traffic and use to this specific section or other author cross-post location.

This game, parts, or resulting text may not be reproduced or shared in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, reposting, or otherwise for any other person—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

©2020 by Ken Wickham

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The poetry textbook chapter 3 begins by categorizing poetry as creative writing which focuses on text that focuses on images (an event in language) experienced primarily through senses—a virtual reality.

But before working with this chapter, I'd like to roll and come up with a new and different rhyming set so that I can review some of my prior poetry techniques, and I liked and begin with a fresh slate of material for this new chapter focus. So, this post will focus on creating new material by reviewing some of the past few poetry post techniques. Then in the next post, I will hope to focus on poetry Images

For this post, I'll roll up another random rhyming word set using Rhyming Fuel.

The d1000 roll is #964 busk, tusk, dusk, husk, musk, lusk, rusk, brusque, cusk, cornhusk, mollusk.

Looking into this wordset, I only see one that is used in a common idiom.

from dusk to dawn

Let me research or freewrite some stuff based on this list.

busk, music, solicit, street musician, market, corner, street
tusk, elephant, walrus, wild boar, sharp
dusk, dawn, evening, sunset, night, ending, final days
husk, outer shell, corn, worthless outer covering
musk, deer musk, scent, odor, perfume, musky
lusk, lounge, skulk, lazy, lethargic, idle, sluggish
rusk, light bread biscuit
brusque, abrupt, blunt, rough, curt
cusk, cod, fish, codlike, with a single long dorsal fin
cornhusk, corn, leafy, ear of corn, outer membrane
mollusk, snail, clam, squid, chiton, octopus, shellfish, invertebrate, cephalopod

Word use Research
From "Same Song & Dance" by Eminem
Of footage of me impalin' myself on an elephant tusk?
We'll settle this once and for all, I'ma tell her at dusk

From "Bring Da Ruckus" by Wu-Tang Clan
I come rough, tough like an elephant tusk
Ya head rush, fly like Egyptian musk

From "To Earthward" by Robert Lee Frost
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of--was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

From "A better Resurrection" by Christina Georgina Rossetti
My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;

From "Time" by Camp Lo
I'm lost, I'm found, my sound was designed by dusk
Clogging emotions and I'm bleeding, I'm lusk

From "Luminous Blues" by Zippy Kid
The time is the unremitting sable dusk,
Its the idle space without her for stuck on,
My life was worse than a stale rusk,
I grieved it still flowed on.

word combinations
cephalopod mollusk
gastropod mollusk
giant mollusk
freshwater mollusk
marine mollusk
mollusk fossils
mollusk shells
rare mollusk

Freewriting the Rhyming Set
I heard the busk in the dusk of eve. I'm just a husk of my former self. The tusk protruded sharp and long. From noon to dusk. A heavy scent of musk. Don't be brusque! Hurt and lusk. Eating cusk and rusk. A single foot of a slug or snail mucus wave of muscular contraction sliding and gliding along a mucus slime. At dusk. By dusk. After dusk. Aromatic musk.

Based on that free writing I am going to edit, expand, and organizing the freewriting list for a poetry images exercises.

I heard the busk,

echo the city dusk.

I'm just a husk,

of my former self.

Protruding sharp and long, 

impaled the tusk.

From noon to dusk.

A heavy scent of musk.

Don't be brusque!

Hurt and lusk.

Eating cusk and rusk.

The sliding and gliding mollusk.

A single foot of a mollusk.

Aromatic musk.

There by dusk.

Gone by dusk.

Okay, for the next poetry post I hope to begin to use these 16 lines of original material to explore poetic images.

Learning about Poetry (part 6): Muse #4 Freewriting (Random Prompt)

The main tool for this exercise is freewriting. In exercise #1 we did some freewriting based on a random rhyming word set.

This exercise will differ in that first, instead of rolling for a rhyming set, I'll roll for one random result for each part of speech. I will then try to freewrite whatever comes to mind for 10 minutes, jumping from word to word or back depending on spontaneous thoughts.

Noun 1162 = compromise
Adjective 1785 = shopping
Verb 646 = prevent
Adverb 988 = yearningly
Interjection 499 = just kill me
Preposition 760 = prior to
Pronoun 77 = this
Conjunction 80 = supposing
Determiner 2 = the [singular]

Freewriting for 10 minutes exercise focusing on the above random words

There is no compromise. I must prevent laziness. Yearningly, I study poetry in hopes of figuring out the basics. If everything progresses enough, then poetry will be another form of artistic expression; supposing, that enough of the basics are adequate. THIS is the answer that has slipped through the grasp of scholars and politicians. THE end. Prior to writing this post, I was creating the next names book. Shopping exhausts me. But it does not prevent spontaneity. "Just kill me!" she said in a mocking manner. Yearningly, I typed each word wondering what would emerge. Prior to compromising during the deal, I shopped. Freewriting is a form of writing; supposing, that something inspirational emerges from all of the typing. But it should not prevent creativity. The fact of the matter is that I must type until the full 10 minutes is reached. this thought can go. I type and type until I know. Where does it go. How knows. Ouch my toe. I blow and row until tomorrow. You're not my foe. It will expose. 

Ok. I typed up some spontaneous stuff.

The orange highlights were attempts to mix the preposition with two words based on two other parts of speech.

When I reached the yellow highlighted section, I just suddenly felt like rhyming with go for some reason. I don't know why. It might mean something. Or it might mean nothing.

This is freewriting. There might be something here, especially with the rhyming "go" words.

In the another exercise, I might explore those rhyming words.

Quick edit on the yellow highlighted rhyming words

Next, I will look at, edit, and change the yellow words a bit

This thought can go. 

I type and type until I know. 

Where does it go. 

Who will know. 

Ouch my toe. 

I blow and row until tomorrow. 

You're not my foe. 

At the expo. 

That is enough freewriting for today.

Summertime Writing: Combine and Adapt Ideas In Stories

In the last innovation post, I tried to use the substitution method for story innovation. In this post, I'd like to try the next SCAMPER methods of innovation and creativity. I will do the second and third of the seven parts of the SCAMPER method in this post—Combine and Adapt.

New ideas created on this page are ©2019 by Ken Wickham

1. State the original idea, problem, or question (source).

For this case, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Synopsis found at Wikipedia. I cut together pieces of the larger synopsis.

tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a hideous, sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment...the Creature tall, about 8 feet (2.4 m) in height and proportionally large. Despite Victor's selecting its features as beautiful, upon animation the creature is instead hideous, with watery white eyes and yellow skin that barely conceals the muscles and blood vessels underneath. Repulsed by his work, Victor flees when it awakens. While wandering the streets, he meets his childhood friend, Henry Clerval, and takes Henry back to his apartment, fearful of Henry's reaction if he sees the monster. However, the Creature has escaped.

Intelligent and articulate, the Creature relates his first days of life, living alone in the wilderness and finding that people were afraid of and hated him due to his appearance, which led him to fear and hide from them. While living in an abandoned structure connected to a cottage, he grew fond of the poor family living there, and discreetly collected firewood for them. Secretly living among the family for months, the Creature learned to speak by listening to them and he taught himself to read after discovering a lost satchel of books in the woods. When he saw his reflection in a pool, he realized his physical appearance was hideous, and it terrified him as it terrifies normal humans. Nevertheless, he approached the family in hopes of becoming their friend. Initially he was able to befriend the blind father figure of the family, but the rest of them were frightened and they all fled their home, resulting in the Creature leaving, disappointed. He traveled to Victor's family estate using details from Victor's journal, murdered William, and framed Justine.

The Creature demands that Victor create a female companion like himself. He argues that as a living being, he has a right to happiness. The Creature promises that he and his mate will vanish into the South American wilderness, never to reappear, if Victor grants his request. Should Victor refuse his request, The Creature also threatens to kill Victor's remaining friends and loved ones and not stop until he completely ruins him.

Fearing for his family, Victor reluctantly agrees. The Creature says he will watch over Victor's progress. 

2. SCAMPER

Substitute is about replacing parts of the story. Characters, description, setting, plots, or conflicts may be replaced with alternatives.

Combine is about merging two or more ideas, processes, or products into one.

Adapt is adjusting, changing, and tweaking to make more suited for the current situation.

Modify, minimize, or maximize

Put to another use

Eliminate or elaborate

Reverse

Combine

The method that I will try is to trying to combine a few popular classic story elements into the Frankenstein story. I'll pick three classic popular stories, at least in the US.

To Kill a Mockingbird

A minority is wrongly accused of a crime committed by a prejudice and lazy low life character that only has the benefit of being a member of the majority. The wife of this character dreams of having an affair with the accused character prior to the accused "crime".

Maybe the best way to combine these stories is to use the De Lacey family, the family that adopts the creature and are living in exile from the government for treason, in a similar way that Mayella and her father, Bob Ewell are used in the story. Or I can use the creature in the same way as Boo Radley, the reclusive person next door that is friendly with Scout and Dill and eventually saves them from Bob Ewell.

Victory Frankenstein could either be more like Aticus, the lawyer that defends Tom Robinson, the accuse, or like Tom Robinson himself.

The Grapes of Wrath

Since Tom Joad eventually kills the person that kills his friend Jim Casy in a union violent clash, the creature might work well as Tom, recently released from prison and now a fugitive breaking parole, the main character in the book. Victor Frankenstein might work as Jim Casy, his friend from the town that they left due to bank foreclosure and journeyed to California in search of work. After a flood, they might seek higher ground and find in a barn a boy and starving (blind) father, the De Lacey family

Aladdin
Maybe Victor could play the role of Aladdin, an impoverished youth that is recruited by the creature to recover a wonderful oil lamp from a booby-trapped magic cave. The creature could play the role of the sorcerer from the book. A genie appears after rubbing a magic lamp. With the power of the genie, Victor becomes powerful and marries a high society princess.

The creature that recruited Aladdin might steal the lamp after which Victory must try to get back the magic lamp.

Analysis of combine technique

The Grapes of Wrath would be the most difficult to combine stories. However, To Kill a Mockingbird and Aladdin I felt had much more usable content that might be able to combine with Frankenstein.

Adapt

Adapting is brainstorming with the purpose of trying to adjust, tweak, or change a product into something more appropriate for the current situation.

The most obvious way to adapt Frankenstein, writing in the early 1800s, would be to adapt it to the modern time period. Weird science sort of adapted Frankenstein to the 80s.

How could Frankenstein be adapted to 2019.

Let me brainstorm.

Instead of alchemy, Dr. Victor Frankenstein might use modern DNA splicing and create a creature using different DNA from different people—or even mixed with different species, a hybrid.

The creature escapes and lives with the De Lacey family which might be an off-the-grid or doomsday preppers. The creature learns from these survivalists and learns to speak English. The creature then eventually contacts Victor and threatens to kill his family if he doesn't create a partner for him.

Analysis of Adapt

Adapting might be more fun if mixed with some of the other techniques. I don't like doing a straight adaptation of Frankenstein.

Summertime Writing: Freestyle Nouns & Word Qualities

With three flash fiction stories finished, I can get back to summertime writing.

In the first four summertime writing posts, the source for the exercises was the Spellbinding Sentences put out by Writer's Digest by Barbara Baig. I tried to personalize the exercises so that they are original content for this blog.

In this exercise, I want to combine two sources for the exercise. The first also comes from S.S. chapter 6 on the Qualities of Words. In the chapter it mentions words that are formal vs informal, general vs specific, and abstract vs concrete. A fun exercise to do is to mix this with an exercise that I read in another book, 90 Days to Your Novel by Sarah Domet. In day 1 exercise Ready, Set, Go (With What You Know), the author challenges the writer to brainstorm from early memories people, places, and things. Instead of 2 hours, I will do a short version.

Brainstorm Nouns

People: Old grandfather was very crafty, school bully that class stood up against, inventive friend that doesn't trust anyone, deliverer, acquaintance that likes physical activities, art teacher that is very old and yet stylish, a two-faced person, brother.

Places: fragmented hometown, desert oasis, vine infested jungle, in the middle of a hurricane, standing on a pier smelling the scent of seawater and hearing the sound of waves hit the support, on a bicycle, canoeing down a river, on an exercise bicycle.

Things: watch, pencil, computer, paper, led light, dice, hometown football shirt, fast racecar, canoe, yellow one-person tent, old pad of paper that is almost used up, the sound of fall maple leaves blowing in a strong wind outside the room window, van.

Analysis of Nouns

The first thing that I realized while typing these up was that for people and places were easier to make specific, for me, than things. Towards the end of making the list of things, I consciously shifted into trying to make more specific things. I also notice that my mind was blank at first and then I just started to list things in my vacinity. The "sound of fall maple leaves..." was a memory, however.

In this brainstorm, I did not list any proper nouns even though several of the nouns do have proper noun names.

The hometown football shirt could be a jersey, but when I wrote it I was wearing a t-shirt with the teams name on it.

Many of the longer written words and phrases do have a more emotional connection with me compared to the single or general words.

I do need a few abstract nouns. I'll do that now. time, challenge, understanding, effort, growth.

Next posts

This post will probably serve as a foundation for several posts because both books have further exercises reusing these initial collections of words.

Summertime Writing: freewriting

This summer I want to try several activities just to experiment.

Writing things out, for me, helps in the future for future projects. I'll check out a few books from a library that have engaging activities and see what becomes of these experiments.

Why would I do such a potential messy activity?

Over time, stuff that is recorded has a way of becoming something else in the future.

However, if information isn't recorded then it can't become anything in the future.

The current book that I will use to try some exercises is Spellbinding Sentences by Barbara Baig.

This post is a freewriting practice from chapter 2, the exercise subtitled Be a Writer.

For that exercise, the author challenges the writer to sit down and type for 10 minutes without stopping in order "to write".

Freewriting is a prewriting technique used to produce raw material (content) in order to overcome potential writing blocks such as criticism or apathy. The technique may also be used to generate or create beginning ideas or initial thoughts.

I'm going to mix this exercise with picking a current event and trying to change the event into a fictional event.

A few days ago, the Toronto Raptors won the NBA Championship. In the game, Kevin Durant, one of the Golden State Warriors' main star, returned and was injured in the first half—a game where his team eventually lost.

Let me try turning parts of that idea into a fictional situation.

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First, keeping his initials, I'll change Kevin Durant into Keith Duvall.

For a genre, I'll change the situation into a western gunfighter situation.

Keith Duvall is a heroic, an African American former Union soldier who fought in the US Civil War.

After the war, Keith settled and built a cattle ranch in the expanding Western Frontier.

Several outlaws had ravaged the area in recent days and made off with several head of cattle.

He awoke that night hearing his cattle restless and commotion out at his barn.

Grapping his rifle, he shouted to his ranch hands to get their guns.

Outside, in the half moonlight night, he saw the torches bright like a swarm of fireflies around the large barn.

"Go right," he whispered and hand motioned to his help.

Taking position behind a large oak tree, he began to fire his rifle at the nearest bandits.

The bandits shouted to each other and then bullets began flying at Keith.

He felt pain as one tore through his lower leg.

In the skirmish, Keith was injured with his posy against the bandits in a shoot out.

Unfortunately Keith was injured—shot in the calf—early during the volleys of bullets.

Upset and in agony, he watched as many of his cattle were taken away. One of his main ranch hands was also injured.

He could not protect his ranch despite his prior victories in war.

He swallowed hard—a painful sickness swam in the pit of his stomach.

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In the future I'll try several more writing exercises, or whatever, during this summer.