I used to think of myself as some kind of lightning rod, waiting to catch the inspiration and direct it where I needed it. Only important subjects please. And I truly believed if I just sat in one place long enough, and shut out the rest of the world, it would find me. Wham! I would catch the lightning and I would find a way to translate this earth shattering insight into four minutes of music and lyric.
The worst of it was that I was so busy searching for lightning, I missed a lot of songs along the way. I've met and worked with a number of amazing writers who have demonstrated clearly the importance of the evade. Nik Venet stresses in his workshop, and with The Campfire Conspiracy, the importance of keeping a journal. He also suggests a reading list with storytellers like Raymond Carver, who tells stories of the everyday where the main characters don't change into celebrities at the end of each story or grow up to become royalty or millionaires. They pretty much stay the same as when they started. But the stories are told in such lifelike detail, the reader changes.
Robert Thornburg, one of the Campfire's favorites, has written a song called "Superbowl Sunday," which says, "The sun's been up for hours...I have no eggs or bread...I could drive to the market...but I decide to walk instead. And as I walk I see things...things I've never seen before...like the pretty little girl in the dumpster...and her brother outside the store." Audiences are spellbound as this story unfolds, showing the little girl in the dumpster letting loose a spiraling head of lettuce which little brother, going deep and cutting back, catches and laterals to grandma who spikes it into the shopping cart.
This song is so well known among the Sunday Night Campfire audiences that Bruce Larsen jokes with them that he ran to the store, hurried by some little girl in a dumpster and her family, and got back home as soon as he could so he could work on a song he'd been thinking about. And that's what most people do, seriously. They miss the songs in life, because they're so busy thinking about writing.
Sarah Kim Wilde writes, "Sittin' at the Kmart Counter, wishin' I had more mustard, and more money and more time.....A broken man walks over, I play I haven't noticed but I can't ignore the soft tapping on my arm and he says, 'Little miss, is this seat taken and have you found the Good Lord Jesus, you're lookin' so alone...' " The story she tells is short, full of pictures...an everyday story, and yet in less than three minutes, she reveals more about herself and life than most people do in a novel.
Steve Wagner writes about high school days with a friend named Danny, "He'd get me at eight / And we'd head to this place/Out where the road turned to dirt/He'd have a beer/And he'd disappear/Hot on the trail of a skirt/He wasn't that brave/The one thing that saved him/Was knowing a more frightened man/So I'd hold his place/And tell him, 'Go get her, ace'/Then I would clap for the band."
First of all, the everyday is full of pictures because they're there, part of the physical world that surrounds us. When we start waxing poetic and philosophical, even emotional, we sometimes lose the pictures. Great writers frequently use the everyday pictures to deliver the emotion. That way the listener discovers and unravels the emotion or the philosophy by looking at the pictures, rather than having it telegraphed, as he might by a lesser writer.
Bill Berry, Jim Dean and Martha Moore have a song called, "Pecan Pie," about an attempt at rekindling an old flame which says, "She walks into the bedroom/I stand at the door/Nothing's movin' but the ceiling fan/I lie down beside her/In a comfortable spoon/She traces circles on the back of my hand."
Of course, 100 people can see a movie and come away with 100 different interpretations; imagine how many different stories 100 different writers could come away from real life with, even observing the same scene. It's a veritable "Rashamon." That's where unique viewpoint and style come in.
The Farmers' Market in the on 3rd and Fairfax in Los Angeles is a wonderful place to observe the everyday. People from all over the world come there as tourists. Elderly comedians have lunch and try to top each other with one-liners. Unnatural-orange-haired ladies stand in line for an entire lunch break just to buy one lottery ticket or scratch-off, only to complain publicly and loudly when it doesn't bring them the fortune they expected. The shoe shine man has seen it all and isn't telling. And everywhere there's an impending feeling of tenuousness - like it could all be torn down at a moment's notice to make way for a high rise. In a city which witnessed Ship's Restaurants closing in 1995, one gets the feeling that nothing is sacred. And for a songwriter to lose a place like the Farmer's Market, it would be like a farmer losing his top soil.
Even if we do no more than train our powers of observation, we can start finding the magic in the everyday, whether we write about it or simply learn to witness it. We may choose to write about the deepest of issues and emotions, but the pictures will come from the regular old world around us. From the everyday. And every day we don't observe them, we could be missing an opportunity to discover a treasure.
© 1996 Harriet Schock
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