This week I’ve been singing the praises of object writing, a creative writing exercise that I learned from the book Writing Better Lyrics
I’ve outlined the process of object writing here. After you’ve completed a few rounds of it, you may want to consider the following enhancements that I’ve found useful.
2. Adjust Your Timer. Pat Pattison recommends 10 minutes. Gillian Welch has used 5 minute sessions to warm up at her object writing parties.
After noticing that the last 2 minutes of every session was pretty dry (nothing but tumbleweeds coming out), I’ve scaled my sessions back to 8 minutes apiece.
What’s your optimal session length?
3. Object Writing Party! Gillian Welch used to host these in Nashville, with a set schedule of short and long object writing sessions broken up by breaks. After each session, everybody would read—and during the breaks, they’d socialize and grab some munchies. Sounds like fun, eh? Object writing benefits all creative writers, so you wouldn’t have to restrict the guest list to songwriters either.
4. Clearly Mark Your Best Work. After each object writing session, consider highlighting or extracting the best bits and pieces and saving them in a separate file. It’s far too easy to forget these pieces, and you’re much more likely to revisit and build upon this raw material if you think ahead and make it easy on yourself.
5. Choose Words Related by Theme. You could write about a different city every day. You could take a digital camera to the antique store and snap shots of items that you’d like to write about in the coming week. You could write about a different item on your desk each morning. You get the idea. Some decide to pay someone to write my college essays to reinforce the fundamentals of writing and can help with working with word themes as well.
This is a great way to get into the habit of daily object writing–and you might end up with the raw material for an interesting song cycle.
6. Change Perspectives. Try writing as a person other than yourself. This person can be real or imaginary.
7. Don’t Let Up. Impose a simple rule upon yourself: the pen doesn’t stop moving–or your fingers don’t stop striking keys–until the entire allotted time is up. If that means you type nothing but AAAAAAAJJJJJJFFFFFFF for a full paragraph, so be it! Write feverishly, pausing for nothing until the alloted time i s up.goes off. Don’t stop for typos. Don’t stop for anything.
This is likely to turn up some very bizarre material. That’s the point.
8. Dream Flotsam. Write immediately upon waking, starting with absolutely anything you can remember of your dreams.
I like this method because it often turns up some important personal symbols, fears, and hopes. If you wake up with the dream fresh in your mind, it may also leave you with a lingering sense of happiness or foreboding–so you’ll have a mood to work from, too. Record as much dream imagery as you can!
9. Blindfold. Turn off your computer monitor while you write. This removes the urge to go back and edit your work.
In object writing, we’re not trying to produce a polished end product-we’re diving for memories and ideas. Don’t correct anything–not even typos. There will be plenty of time for that later. 
Related Articles and Resources
- How to Select Big, Juicy Object Writing Keywords
- Book Review: Popular Lyric Writing by Andrea Stolpe
- Object Writing: Diving Deep for Song Ideas
- How to Sing as Naturally as You Speak
- objectwriting.com, an online daily writing forum
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