Here, the exercise is to listen to a track and capture where your mind goes. That means trying to figure out the mood, images, words, phrases, or pretty much anything that comes to mind. I just randomly searched for copyright free music and tried to pick one that could have some room for interpretation (and hopefully a genre that many of us are not used to writing with). When you are taking notes, try to use some time stamps as well. The purpose of this is to trust your stream of consciousness and be able to write it down.
I am calling this the Michelangelo technique because he had a famous saying about a block of marble already has the sculpture in it, his job was to release it.
As an example, something like this might be what you write down:
0:15: sad, water flowing, leaves in a path
0:45 - 1:50: momentum building, sunlight coming through clouds, orange, park bench, playing frisby,
2:00: Happiness, flying, soaring, gravity, teeth,
I just completely pulled that out of nowhere, but you get the point.
0:00 - 0:10 : A nice stroll, carefree, holding hands with someone you like, purple
0:11 - 0:42: Picking up pace, putting an arm around her, lemonade, searching for shade, bright sun but clouds are beginning to roll in
0:43 - 1:25: Sitting and chilling under a tree, watching a crowd sitting on a stairwell stoop, the clouds have arrived and a light drizzle of rain is coming down, dappled raindrops reflecting prisms of light, Occasionally we get a drop on us when enough has saturated a leaf
1:26 - 2:17: The rain passed by, she is in a flowered dress, I have on worn out shoes, my socks are wet, she wore flip flops, we haven’t eaten but are not hungry
2:17 - 2:19: a kiss, soft, well intentioned, light smear of dark lipstick, closed eyes for a blink in time, we are on our way walking again
0:00 - Sitting on the veranda, he is daydreaming for ideas. He has been trying to gently figure something out in his head.
00:11 - Suddenly, he starts to make sense of this thing, and starts working toward a solution. He gets up and walks forward toward the place he is trying to get to.
0:43 - A moment of epiphany, things are starting to come together. He is onto something.
0.55 - He needs to keep going now, he knows which direction to walk, has had the taste of the solution and needs to replicate that brief moment of success.
1:27 - He has done it again. From here on in life is good. He walks down the street this time with a slight skip in his step having experienced the ultimate simplicity of the world.
It’s funny how strongly the pull to turn everything into story is!
It is quite fun listening to it again whilst reading your words, and again interesting how our minds can find those words in the music once they have been primed for it - kind of like with the abstract art exercises.
Great stream of consciousness writing - something I need to loosen myself further into!
It is no problem. If you look at mine, there is some coherence among the fragmented thoughts as well. That’s just the human brain for you. It’s good to see. And there’s another exercise later that is limited stream of consciousness, so you’ll have another opportunity.
0:00 - 0:10 - Run down basketball court, weeds growing through cracks in the ground, whiskey, cigars, cocktail dressed dances
0:10 - 0:43 - Finding a 20 on the ground, rolling up to club in a vintage car, watching a 30’s gangster movie
0:43 - 0:53 - shop windows, seeing a good friend, catching the eye of a hottie
0:53 snapping back to reality, slowly walking through tree lines sidewalks back to a small weatherboard house
(I’m not sure if this is where I’m up to but I’m going to just start from here)
The post book exercises don’t really have to be in any order, I just kind of threw them up. You have some really great images here. I think this is really interesting just to see where our minds take us solely through the music. Things like weeds growing through cracks, watching a gangster movie, and catching the eye of a hottie are really fun images. This exercise suits you!
