“Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”
- Robert Frost
I do a daily writing exercise known as “Free Writing.” You see it referenced a lot. It's a way to get your brain working and maybe have something in your subconscious break loose and float to the top. Maybe some song idea will show up. You can do it for a certain amount of time (10-minutes for me) or a number of pages. There's no rule. The idea is to not think, just to write…whatever comes to mind, write it down. Don't edit anything, just write. You can sit down to a blank page and take off with whatever comes into your head. Or, you can “Object Write." That's where you pick some object or word or phrase and go to town with that.
Here's an example. Say you're going to write on the term “dump truck.” Okay, right off, dump truck might remind you of the movie Heathers, which makes you wonder what ever happened to Christian Slater, and that reminds you of how much you hated that song Sister Christian and how it was playing on the radio in the car that time in 1984 when you and that girl were breaking up, and you wonder what happened to her… and where was Night Ranger from anyway?…San Francisco? San Francisco reminds you of that trip to Sausalito when you had a Hangtown omelet for the first time. Well, eggs and oysters are a long way from a dump truck, but you see how it all might work. A lot can go on in ten minutes. You never know what might get dislodged.
I have a basket of words and phrases that I've written on small strips of paper and I sometimes pull something out of there to use. Yesterday I pulled this out, “White Picket Fences.” What would come to your mind if you wrote about that for ten minutes? Here are a few that came to mine:
I first thought of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence. How Tom duped Ben Rogers out of his apple and got him to do his work for him. I remember loving the book when I read it as a pre-teen. I think I also had a crush on Becky Thatcher, I just didn't know what that was when I was ten-years old.
But then my mind went to a dreaded activity on the farm growing up that involved fences, or more specifically, “fixing fence.” You see, in most cases, fixing fence was what you did when there was really nothing else to do. No farm work excited me in my youth, but fixing fence was the worst kind of farm work there was except those that involved manure. It seemed like a make-work activity to me then, something Dad dreamed up to keep me busy. I'd be a better farmhand now but I still wouldn't want to fix fence.
Then I thought about how sometimes when I'm driving around in rural America, I'll come upon some bucolic farm-like spread that has acres of white fence. Those places are beautiful and impressive, but I immediately think to myself, “Those aren't real farmers, they're pretend.” Real farmers don't have the money to blow on that kind of window dressing. They need functional fencing that keeps livestock off the highway, that's it. I may not have liked growing up on the farm but certain attitudes were instilled in me. I guess I'm a farm snob in reverse.
Anyway…Fences. No song ideas showed up for me just yet, but they have for some people: