I am addicted to the song “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic. It's the first thing I listen to in the morning. It all started when the lead singer of OneRepublic, Ryan Tedder, was a guest mentor on The Voice.
Now, I know you're gonna cringe, but I'll say it anyway. I love music, and yet, even as a writer, I never digest the lyrics. Weird I know.
In this case something Tedder said struck a chord. He described the meaning behind the song (being broke, worrying about money, wishing not to worry…) and all of a sudden I wanted to listen to the song and absorb the lyrics. In doing so, I found a stockpile of similarities between the words in the song and my life as a writer. Let's take a look at the lyrics and see if they hit you too.
photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor via photopin cc
“Lately I been, I been losing sleep, Dreaming about the things that we could be.”
Who hasn't felt this way? For years I searched and searched. I tried and failed. I jumped and flopped. Through it all I always had a dream of what could be, namely, doing something I felt passionate about. Writing became that thing.
“I feel something so right, By doing the wrong thing”
How many times have you been told that you should be doing something other than writing? It still happens to me 🙂
Writing makes us feel good, makes us experience life and makes us feel whole. How could something that right be wrong?
“I don't think the world is sold, I'm just doing what we're told”
Katie recently wrote a post about making art. In it she talks about creating art daily and making it part of our routine.
As a member of the human race, we're often told to do the right thing, and the right thing often involves getting a nine-to-five job, getting married, following the rules, etc… Being an artist means exploring those boundaries and, when needed, breaking through them.
Are you sold on what the world is telling you about being a writer, namely, that you shouldn't be one?
“I been prayin' hard, Said no more counting dollars, We'll be counting stars”
What happens when we stop worrying about how much money we're making and start focusing on the beauty around us? Miracles.
This is sometimes a tough concept for me to grasp because success is often graded by the size of your treasure pile. I want to make money as a writer AND enjoy what I do. Imagine if all we had left to do was count stars…
What songs do you listen to that inspire your writing?
PRACTICE
Choose one of the lines from above and use it as inspiration to write a story about an aspiring writer trying to make it. Will it be a story of hope or heartbreak? Will she chase the dollar or reach for the stars?
Post your practice in the comments section below and please provide feedback for your peers 🙂
I been prayin’ hard. Said no more counting dollars. We’ll be counting stars
Every day she practiced being a writer. She set her intent, she jouurnaled, she blogged and she began a book, the one she promised her husband she would write. The blog was secret and so was her identity on it. True Confessions, the tawdry magazine she loved reading in the grocery store as a kid, that is what she thought of it as being.
The book was her husband’s experiences in Vietnam. Being a woman and writing about Marines at war didn’t work for her. She needed a little more. She added a family back home receiving his letters and having their own traumas and dramas. There were notes left by his mother which were jumping off points, arrows pointing.
The journal was a brain drain. It helped her put everything in perspective. She was smarter on the days she wrote like this because she thought her way through to the logical conclusions of all the things rattling around in her mind.
The blog attracted attention. Then she wrote things about her husband’s experiences with the VA and it landed on the front of the sites featured stories. She had to confess to her husband what she was doing. He was interested.
She read him some of the book. “It didn’t happen like that he said. I never ever hit my mother.”
“She says you did.”
“Stop writing then. You aren’t telling it my way.”
“But your way will never have a reader. Just your recollections. What kind of context will that have. This will be a novel.
“I don’t want any part of it.”
By then the story she was telling couldn’t be stopped even if he didn’t like how she told it. Still she worked on it. Took it apart, put it back together several times. She would work on it when he was drunk. She would write the mean things he said and have the father say them.
When she wrote about PTSD and the VA on her blog, VA executives contacted her by email. It scared her.
When she journaled, she said hurtful things about others, how her own life hurt, how hard it all it was.
Each word she wrote was like a knife in someone’s life.
She stopped writing. She wished she had never wished one day to be a writer because now she was and each word was a danger to her and others. Words are not play things.
Still though, she writes. Because she is a writer. Sometimes she burns what she writes in a fire. Enough time, lots of therapy for his PTSD replaced his objections and he encouraged her to finish the book. The war hurt and the book would too, but he wanted his story told.
Facebook took over blogging. Still every word she writes is a telegraph to the big word collectors in the sky. Writing is a scary thing.
Powerful. Amazing how writing can take over and exude a power of its own. Thank you so much for sharing, Carole.
Thank you
This is the first time I’ve listened to One Direction… ever. And it’s a good song!
I listen to rain.simplynoise.com, and make it really stormy!! That’s what gets me motivated to write.
Here’s my fiction practice, from this line: “Lately I been, I been losing sleep, Dreaming about the things that we could be.”
————————————————————————————————
In the quiet hours, I open my eyes as if I’ve actually heard Seth say the words. I slip out of the sheets and steal down the hall. They all sleep, their sweaty hair matted to their heads. I pull the doors shut as I pass, not willing to click them shut for fear the tiny noise will rouse them. I know just what he will say before he dies.
I want to get my numbers in, my words, my goal. I have the whole next three chapters in my mind, waiting, like actors outside the curtain, itching to say their lines.
But the clock hands move faster than my fingers can type. Marina won’t murder Seth this morning. Faith is at my side, sucking her thumb and shoving her empty sippy cup at me. I hover my fingers over the keyboard, but Marina isn’t done arguing with her father, and she still has to find the knife.
I should start the coffee.
The days goes on, the hours pass. I do the laundry and pay the bills. Around three, I think of Seth’s last words again… but I can’t remember exactly how they went. I turn the computer on, to try to flesh them out, but Joey comes running in with a bloody knee. When I’ve put the bandages away, Heather needs help with her math.
After dinner, Mike wants me to snuggle on the couch and watch a movie.
It’s getting late.
I watch the clock, I want to sleep. If I don’t go to bed now, I’ll miss my morning alarm.
“Watsa matter?” Mike says, pulling me closer. “The kids are sleeping, it’s fine.”
The next morning, I slide out from under his arm, my eyes heavy. I rush to the computer, and open the document.
Marina grabs the knife, plunges it into his chest, but there is only silence.
Oh god, not One Direction!! No way. Sorry One Direction, I respect your talent, but I hate your music. Period. The wonderful Counting Stars is by One Republic 😛
And now it’s painfully obvious how much I don’t know about popular music.
Haha, no worries! XD I have an obsession for music, but I don’t know much about popular music, either, simply because I think most of it is horrible 😛 One Direction makes me cringe though, so I had to tell you. 😀
One Direction comment aside (that was awesome by the way), jeez this one hit home for me. I’ve got three kids and juggle my writing between their fun-filled lives. I could feel the need to just get that darned idea down before it disappeared. Thanks for sharing, Brianna!
Thanks for the encouragement! It wasn’t really fiction so much as a fictionalized account of my life as a mommy writer.
I hate that!!! I wish I had a brain recorder and I could go back and remember the things I so desperately wanted to write! Nice work!
Hey, I love that song too!!! It’s amazing! <3 Okay, here's mah practice:
Nick fidgited and rolled over in bed, his mind ablaze with ideas that didn't fit and inspiration that didn't flow. His breath hissed out of him in frustration as he formed sentence after sentence after sentence in his mind, desperately trying to convey the thought and meaning he felt inside through the delicate,refined emotion of words.
Despite his frustration, these late nights and sleepless hours always paid off with mountains of work. It would lead to some good quality key-pounding tomorrow, and he quite enjoyed his forays into the depths of his creative mind, in the end.
"Shards of stars, fallen to Earth, sprinkling the water and twinkling in cold moonlight," Nick whispered to himself, trying out the line. He growled in self doubt, shifting slightly and biting his lip. Would the readers know he was only making a metaphor, comparing the stars to the choppy glitter of lake-shine? Maybe, maybe not.
Why did he do this to himself?
Nick shot bolt upright in bed and ran a hand through his unruly brown hair, combing it out of his eyes. That was a stupid question; he did it because he loved it. He loved going on adventures, and he loved the magic of words and the excitement of a battle he would never have. The surge of adrenaline in his veins, and the children of his mind, his beloved characters. He wrote to share this excitement with the world, and to release its thick flow within him into the world.
He didn't write for money. He wrote for life.
Great stuff, Brianna. The self-doubt fighting against the need to share. Sound familiar 🙂 Thanks for contributing!
Thanks! ^ ^ Yeah, that’s me in a nut shell . XD
This is unfinished and not even read through, colicky newborn and all.
7am
Somewhere in a deep dark void a ringing is happening. Somewhere that is moving and by the sound moving closer. Ring. Ring. Ring.
It’s 8:47 in the morning and Charles Ladderman is late. He sighs and violently lashes out at his antiquated alarm clock. “Everyone uses their cell phones now,” he’d said when he bought it. “Everyone is digitized, but this, this is real, this is what an alarm clock should be.” Petulant artist. Hack. Imposter. Spend a weeks worth of cigarette money on a vintage bell alarm clock to be different and spend every morning hating it. Charles Ladderman swings his feet to the floor and braces himself for another day at a job he hates, followed by drinks with friends he can’t stand, and if he is just the right amount of obliterated, a late night visit to an old friend, wink wink, nudge nudge. Anything to avoid coming home tonight.
Charles brushes his teeth without any toothpaste and wears yesterday’s clothes, running out the door to try and catch the last number 17 bus before he’s REALLY late. Late is acceptable, REALLY late will mean a lecture from a man so tall Charles has to look up to make eye contact, which wouldn’t be so bad if Tall Man didn’t have an excessive nose hair problem.
The snow moves under his feet in compact little crunches as Charles goes to the door of his office building. Security guard releases a single finger from his grip on the morning newspaper and raises it in greeting.
“He probably wakes up to a cell phone alarm,” Charles thinks, his earlier self loathing replaced with his more typical superiority complex.
An office building is an office building is an office building. And this one is no exception. Opting for the stairs instead of the elevators Charles brain begins to click with each step.
Don’t check the mail.
I have to check the mail.
Leave it till tomorrow.
The mailman is leaving me threatening notes about the fullness of my box.
So what. Let them keep my mail. Let them send it all back. Bills, Christmas cards. IT.
I want to know. I need to know.
You already know. It’s always the same.
Didn’t some famous author say each rejection letter was a badge of honor?
No. That’s dumb. Don’t look at the mail.
Charles unzips his jacket and stomps the remaining snow from his feet before entering the carpeted hallway of the offices of Stanzuch and Helmers, the premier firm of failed writers selling their souls for a paycheck one comma at a time.
“Just until I get published,” he’d told himself four years ago.
Charles opened his rectangular desk drawer in his rectangular cubicle and pulled out a rectangular steno pad. Flipping open to a blank page he begins his morning ritual, a detailed list title Reasons To Give Up. He never made a Reasons Not To Give Up list because there would
I really like your style. It has this raw feel that pulled me in. I WANT MORE!
Thanks for sharing, Abbey. You rock.
Hey thanks! I appreciate the feedback!
I got a bit carried away with this one, so I apologise for the length. I really enjoyed writing it though and it feels very relevant to my experiences as a writer.
It is the rare artist who can be satisfied without their work being consumed by an audience. The painter usually paints on the understanding that a viewer will be needed to complete the work. A poet composes, sourcing each the momentum of each sentence from the foretold affectation of a listener. Anna Margaret used to pray for this audience, someone to be there to be enthralled by her words and to give her stories meaning. It had seemed that a book without a reader was a hollow, sad thing. And so, since she was young and her stories were of magic and fantastical creatures, she would crawl into bed at night and sombrely articulate her desire to anyone listening.
As the years went on, Anna Margaret’s life changed. She no longer wrote every spare minute; you would no longer find pages belonging to a dozen different tales carpeting her bedroom floor. The production had slowed first at university – no, that wasn’t right. It had first slowed when she got a part-time job late in high-school. It was a regular job, a menial one, and she did not think it would affect her work. And just as well, because she had big plans to travel for inspiration, to go overseas to knock on the big glass doors of a publisher’s office and dazzle them. But it was not so. Tired feet and a drained mind was what she was left with at the end of the day. Any spare minute was not spent writing but studying or recovering. And so she let her dream rest.
Yet it did not get easier. Throughout university she again found scant time and was dismayed at a state of affairs such that she could barely find a half hour a day to write while not falling behind in life. It got worse when she got her first, grown-up job. (Actually, she had invested so much energy into securing such a job for so many months, that Anna Margaret clean forgot about her writing for her first two months of working!)
I’m sorry to say that it did not get any better here for Anna Margaret. There was a brief, tumultuous relationship that upset her greatly for a long time. And from this came a much unexpected and very beautiful baby girl. Anna Margaret would stare at this happy creature for hours at a time, transfixed by her beauty and so confused over what her life should be now. The little bundle of joy would gurgle her responses to Anna Margaret’s questions and bat chubby fists gently at her rolling tears. After much serious discussions of this nature, Anna Margaret had resolved that her writing would go on hold. She said so with trembling lip, knowing all too well that to come off hold was a herculean task.
Decades passed. Anna Margaret’s dutifully put aside her prayers for literary success and instead prayed for her daughter, opportunities for her daughter, a raise at work to provide a better lifestyle for her daughter. And she did so happily. When her little girl had set off on her own adventures, Anna Margaret found herself sitting at her desk with a pen and paper once again. She picked up the pen with an unsure hand as if her muscles had the memory but her mind did not. And the writing began again. It was different this time, less energetic, more viscous and requiring more effort. Anna Margaret would sit for ten minutes or so debating the next sentence; her younger self would have decried such inactivity as a lost opportunity to write at least half a page. But it came nonetheless. Over the next few months a tremendous peace settled on Anna Margaret, drowning out her concerns. No longer were her weekends spent at the Mall or Ikea, no longer were any anxieties spent over dinners with gentlemen or securing organic and locally-grown. She no longer yearned for readership but would quietly smile when a story was done, the same way she would catch herself smiling sometimes at the thought of her daughter.
One evening many years later, Anna Margaret put down her paper, having finished editing another draft (much to her daughters dismay, she had never had much patience for writing on a computer – she didn’t like the distance between what her hands were doing and where the words were). She placed the papers neatly together again and sat back in her chair. She had done it. Anna Margaret had reached something beautiful. Tears welled up in her eyes as she was overcome. In the work in front of her, she had accessed some rare beauty in the world, some star somewhere, and articulated it into the words that usually fall short. Some deep poignancy was in there, some
fundamental relevance to being alive that she hadn’t thought was possible to
express in writing. Her work was complete. She was in shock, and silently brought her hands to her eyes as the tears began to flow.
That night, Anna Margaret lay in bed exhausted but happy. She went to sleep with a smile on her face. Her prayer was a simple one of gratitude; “Thank you, thank you for that star.”
Love found. Love lost. Love found again.
I know this is a story that resonates with a lot of people. Putting off the dream and forgetting to wish upon a star.
Thank you so much for sharing, Carmen!
I have different songs for different types of scenes. I am one of those rare people who can feel certain songs on a cellular level, so often the lyrics don’t matter. In fact, the lyrics could end up being rather offensive, but if the music reaches me, who cares.
There is a song I often listen to before I start working on my current book as it sets my mood. It’s “Come Along with Me” by Vicci Martinez featuring Cee Lo Green.
I feel the same way. I can listen to lyric laden tune and only feel the music as I write. Love me some Cee Lo too 🙂 Thanks for sharing, Shelly!
For me I honestly have to understand the lyrics. I listen to as much uplifting music as I can find. I mostly listen to hymns and children’s songs. I also love the songs that are available for youth.
best song ever
once u sing it out loud it will feel like ur alredy a STAR
I sat up in my bed, looking over at my niece, who was sleeping on an outstretched blanket. I stayed like that for a few minutes. It was a waste of the time that I could have used to finish my pieces, but I couldn’t help it. She was just so cute!
Eventually I got up and made my way over to the desk. Crumpled papers and old sketches had taken the place of homework and test sheets when summer started. Art was my strong point, but words also called out to me.
I bit my lower lip as the battle started. The sketchpad was peeking out from under a crinkled drawing of a comicbook cover. My writing pad was sprawled open on top of everything, as if it were saying; ‘Hey! Look at me! Use me today!’
Soon, the battle was won. I pulled the sketchpad out from under the clutter that covered it.
Pen touched the paper and that was it. Ideas spun out of my mind like water flowed from a broken tap. I couldn’t stop, it felt too right. It was impossible to describe what I felt then, and it still is impossible even now.
“Bibi…”
That was all I heard before screaming started. I spun around to face Jib-jib. She was sitting up and screaming her little heart out.
I rushed over to her, trying to comfort her. She was screaming like a banshee and I was singing at the top of my lungs, trying to overpower her. Behind all of the noise, I could have sworn that I heard a door slam.
“Be-a-trice!”
Loud thumping footsteps announced my sister’s arrival into the house. I cringed when the thumping on the stairs turned into thumping on my bedroom door.
“What the hell is going on, Beatrice?” my sister, Vonnie, shouted. “Why is it that every time I leave you with Jiva, I come back to hear screaming?”
“Jib-jib just woke up Vonnie!” I shouted in reply.
Vonnie rolled her eyes and stormed over to me. She unceremoniously yanked Jib-jib from my hands and began bouncing her on her hips.
“Wow…” I breathed as Jib-jib suddenly quieted. “I’ve never seen Jib-jib quiet down that quickly!”
Vonnie cut her eyes over to my desk even as she shrugged. Her eyes widened, then she marched over.
“When will you abandon this crap?” she hissed, sweeping papers off my desk. “You need to grow up and get a proper hobby that can get you a proper job!”
“It is a proper hobby!” I retorted.
“Beatrice! Take it from me, you won’t last ten seconds out there! ”
With that, Vonnie was gone. I can’t say that I was sad to see her go. She was just like my classmates, putting me down.
One time, a boy in my class oh-so-kindly let me know that my place as a girl was in the kitchen and nowhere else. It had me feeling down but what the hell, if I was in the wrong for being myself, then I’d gladly keep doing the wrong thing!