EXERCISE: Creativity Supercharged (4)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 31 May 2009

Writers' Digest, August 2006, pages 30, 32 and 33, have an article by Joe Ortiz with some discussion of creativity followed by six -- a half-dozen! -- exercises. The title of the article is, "Supercharge Your Creativity."

From jazz: Improvising a Riff

"Because jazz uses pattern, motif and rhythm as building blocks to create melodic interest, many musicians rely on drills and exercises to shape their solos. Most jazz piano players, for example, practice scales and arpeggios so often that they become automatic. When a pianist holds forth in the heat of a solo, her last thought is on fingering or technique. The patterns have been ingrained; the creativity glides along the surface."

Trumpet player Ruby Braff practiced by writing a short two or four bar phrase, playing it repeatedly until it was memorized. Then he repeated it with different accents. And then he tried inverting it playing the notes backwards, and re-harmonizing it, starting with a different note but the same intervals. He did all this many times, so that that phrase and its variations became automatic.

Your task: "Use the following phrase -- why women don't compromise -- as the first line of a song lyric. (Alternately, if you keep a notebook with titles or catchy phrases, use one of those.) Draw on any wordplay trick you know -- inversion, repetition, rhyme, metrical variation. Write impulsively, without overthinking. Write two quatrains using the same rhythmic pattern. Then write a third in a different structure: Take off in a new direction. (In songwriting lingo, this might be called the bridge or release.) Complete the composition in five minutes."

Take that line, and play with it. Push it through a horn, turn it upside down and inside out, and see what you find underneath. Does this also mean that men do compromise? Hah! Put that in your scene and explode it!

Write!