Do your character speak to you

Whatmysay

New member
When you write a strong character/narrative based song do your work from the narrative or do you build the character and let them speak to you? OK going off on a schizophrenic moment let me clarify. Ibsen the playwright, use to create characters then have ‘tea parties’ in his head to see what they would say to each other and see if anything interesting happened.

So I guess in the ‘blue thunder’ of creation are you guided by what you plan to say (the story) or do you let the entities you create guide you?
 
remids me of a school prject i once did. iwe had to write short stories for english class. now i can come up with good plot lines but i am terrible at charachter development. so i wrote a story about me climbing into a book and spendinga day in the company of sherlock holmes and watzon. it was so well receievd that by the next assignment i wrote a sequal. but it was fun to imagin myself interacting with charachters from edwardian england.
 
Whatmysay said:
Got to love League of Extraordinary Gentlemen then??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen

I must admit I go more on character and let them just do stuff, but also see film sequences with stereotypical character populating them. Never thought of writing using pre-existing character - done in with short film, but an inter-textual song could be really interesting
i never tried soemthing like this in a song. i worte one charachter song once that in know is good but something about it irks me and i can't put my finger on it.
 
This is a very cool topic (at least to me) This could be a very interesting thread.

As a writer, I do allow my characters to speak to me. While most of my writing starts with a chord progression or a riff - once a story line starts to develop, I try to let the story go where it wants to go and have the characters establish the story.

While I don't have tea with them (I don't have time to sit down to tea) :D I do try to imagine how the characters interact. I subcribe to the old school approach of song writing in which the story should have a start, middle and end and should depict pictures which could allow a the listener/reader to envision the scenario.

I tend to write about characters who dwell in the seedier parts of society (examples being: a hooker who love to wear bling, a 17 year old serial killer, a down on his luck drug dealer, a transvestite, a drunken cowboy who gets married to an old truck stop waitress following a long drunken night, a vampire in a dark nightclub waiting to put the bite on someone, etc.).

In each case, these characters become very real in my mind and I try to let them tell me how to relay thier stories.
 
mikeh said:
a drunken cowboy who gets married to an old truck stop waitress following a long drunken night

You didn't write "I Don't Even Know Your Name" (the Alan Jackson song) Did you??

(Alan Jackson, Ron Jackson, Andy Loffin)

Well I was sitting in a roadhouse down on highway 41
You were wiping off some ketchup on a table that was done
I knew you didn't see me, I was in a corner booth
Of course you weren't my waitress mine was missing her front tooth
So I flagged you down for coffee
But I couldn't say a thing
But I'm in love with you baby and I don't even know your name

I'm in love with you baby, I don't even know your name
I've never been too good at all those sexual games
So maybe it's just better if we leave it this way
I'm in love with you baby and I don't even know your name

So I ordered straight tequila, a little courage in a shot
I asked you for a date and then I asked to tie the knot
I got a little wasted, yeah I went a little far
But I finally got to hug you when you helped me to my car
The last thing I remember I heard myself say
I'm in love with you baby, and I don't even know your name

I'm in love with you baby, I don't even know your name
I've never been too good at all those sexual games
So maybe it's just better if we leave it this way
I'm in love with you baby and I don't even know your name

The next thing I remember, I was hearing wedding bells
Standing by a woman in a long white lacy veil
I raised the veil, she smiled at me without her left front tooth
And I said 'Where the hell am I and just who the hell are you?'
She said 'I was your waitress and our last name's now the same'
'Cause I'm married to you baby and I don't even know your name

I'm married to a waitress, I don't even know her name
I've never been too good at all those sexual games
I never thought my love life would quite turn out this way
Hey I'm married to a waitress and I don't even know her name

Get me out 'a here...
 
Good (and interesting) question.

I haven't thought about it much, and I suspect that much of what I write is based more on a snapshot than a narrative, usually - however, I think the answer is still a resounding "yes".

I give a good deal as to whether to write a song in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd person, but there is still often more than one character involved.

I used to write a lot in the 3rd person, and noticed that I was drawing a lot of character portraits and wanted to change that. Also, I find 1st and second person songs can be more immediately engaging.

Even when writing in the first person, the person "speaking" is often a "character" and not absolutely me.

Having said that, it think that it is entirely plausible that all of our characters are aspects of ourselves that we "dress up" to enable us to have internal mono(dia)logues that we would otherwise be prevented from by our own psychological defence systems.

Whatever, I need to get into the skin of the character and understand how they act, how they speak, how they feel and what they are experiencing in order to write anything. In that sense, they "speak" to me. I do this with people I know too, both at work and in my social life. I try and see the world from different perspectives.

There are occasions when I might write from an entirely alien (to me) perspective and that can be quite liberating.

Usually it will be something light-hearted if I do this, possibly humorous even. In those cases I don't need to inhabit the person, I just need to visualise them and see how they act.

Hmm.. could be a very interesting thread. Let's see what other people do :)
 
Randy Newman as a guide

Randy Newman often creates characters and channels them. One of his characters is God in "God's Song," a slaver in "Sail Away," George Bush (even before he was born) in "Political Science." One of my favorites is "Rednecks" but I am afraid of what might happen to me if I sang it on the streets.
I am afraid that all my songs reflect my own point of view. Maybe I need to work on creating characters and record them as they sing.
Rip Van Winkle
 
this sounds like a greta cgalange for me ot undertake. my songs ae susally either a little new agey and metaphorcal or describing emotion. i should try to tell a charchter story one day.
 
mjr

I did not write the Alan Jackson song - and until I just read you post, I was not aware of it. However, the story lines are not all that different.

My song even talks about the missing tooth - "The waitress had a mustach and maybe one good tooth"

The more I write the more I find it's already been written (and I really try to find what I think are semi original things to write about). I guess all we can do as writers, is try to find a new way to say it.
 
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