Musician’s Notebook

So you’ve done your destination writing and thats great. I really hope you didn’t go a second over the time that the alarm rang. So now that you have all that done you will do some sorting.

So you’re going to read each sentence or half sentence and you will write down two columns.

Column One will be EXTERNAL!

Column Two will be INTERNAL!

In external you will write down the descriptions around you. The things you use your 5 senses with. External will be the picture to paint your surroundings. It’s also the best way to really describe and pull a listener/reader into the song. 

Example:

The smell of sewers filled my nose as if it were a grave of a thousand rat corpse.

That right there as far as descriptions make me feel as if we were there. It beats the whole basic description if we were to write:

The sewers smelled bad.

Which would be a generic detail! 

Sometimes externals help us describe internals a whole lot better. My teacher, Andrea Stolpe thought me the best example so I will use her example:

I felt hurt deep down inside.

VS.

I was crying laying on the floor, holding onto the phone, waiting for your call.

I know.. very dramatic, but which one do you think the listener would buy? What if you wanted to convince someone bout how you felt in a situation? Thats what you need in your songs!

Now internals do have a use. They can be descriptive in fact they can be very emotionally descriptive also without being external. 

For an example:

I was so nervous my stomach turned into a knot like the ropes around a tied victim.

I mean we wouldn’t really be able to see an emotion like this and all of a sudden a rope and a tied victim would materialize out of nowhere, right? No. It was all inside the person’s head.

So it can be tricky as to what internal and external can be sometimes, but the best way to do this is read the sentence and then think to yourself, 

For External

—————-

“If I WEREN’T a mind reader, what can I know about this character if I were there?” 

For Internal

—————–

“If I WERE a mind reader what can I know about this character deep down inside?”

So now we get these two columns of EXTERNAL sentences and INTERNAL sentences and I will explain next time on what to do on the next step.

By the way, while you’re at it, I didn’t mention my teacher Andrea Stolpe’s album is out and she also has a book released. Be sure to check out her site to obtain one of them or both of them. I learned a lot from her and I’m very sure you will too. Or just visit the site to learn more about her and see what kind of professionals are teaching at:

http://www.berkleemusic.com

http://www.andreastolpe.com