A Spoken Tongue

I've been thinking about writing lately. I LOVE to write lyrics for songs (mainly because I dream of being a vocalist for a profession).

A major part of writing lyrics is poetics. No, I don't mean rhyming.

If I wanted to rhyme, I would've written rap lyrics.

What I mean is using language to titilate the mind, to engage thought that, perhaps, hasn't been invoked ever before. To convey meaning with abstract language. To say so little, yet say so much.

That last bit is what I've been really thinking about lately. I want to be able to write entire histories with merely hundreds of words as opposed to millions.

I've been reading Donald Miller's Searching For God Knows What lately (it's my toilet reading material ;D), and he mentions Moses' writing Genesis, and how, in the second chapter alone, he described at least one hundred years of existence. He talks about how Moses wrote so poetically that one hundred words could describe the ever-so-studious "Human Condition"; a personality theory that far surpasses the greats of our time, and he did so without having to find another parchment, so to speak.

It's ridiculous, mainly because I agree with Miller's ideas about it. And that's precisely how I want to write. What I have to figure out now is just how to accomplish that while still maintaining my voice, my personality. One of my life goals is to be my real self, always. I hate the ideas of conformity, so that's out. Although, I don't feel it's necessarily conforming to adapt your writing to a style similar to others'. Case in point are the songs I've been writing lately. They don't rhyme - at least not every line. I've been studying lyrics of some of my favorite musical pursuits (Underoath, Attack Attack!, August Burns Red, etc.), and have adjusted my writing to not simply try rhyming, which oh so much of my older writings did, but really be about the topic, the emotion.

Because that's ultimately what it's all about, right? The idea of the song is what you really want to get across, at least in my field of musical venture. We don't strive to sound pretty per se. Yes, we care what we sound like (ie, my screaming sucks, and that's why I haven't actively been working on my "band"), but we don't care so much about our sound being really catchy or likeable by the masses' standards, but rather our own, or, in my case, our specified Audience. I personally write lyrics and most other things I pen for myself and my God. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I digress.

Anyway, that's just stuff I felt like writing about. I needed to vent my fingers, because they were getting really irritated with me.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, I'd love to hear about it, truly.

So long for now!

~@