The Click
One of my favorite techniques for coming up with ideas is pretty simple.
It starts with haiku on Reddit.
Reddit haiku has this addictive kind of honesty. It’s raw. Sometimes hard to understand. But the most important thing is: it often accidentally says something much weirder than the poet ever intended.
Tonight, I found one where the poem was a man screaming at an ocean. No more than this. It was beautiful.
The likely intended reading is he was alone or missed his beloved.
Ignore it.
Consider instead: why is he screaming at a body of water?
Walk down to the water’s edge, stand with the man, and think about it. Look out at the ocean with him. What is even out there to scream at?
What if it’s something… magical?
A few possibilities come up immediately.
- Perhaps he is summoning a Kraken, Clash of the Titans style.
- Maybe he’s a wizard and screaming at bodies of water causes fish to jump out so he can catch them for lunch.
- Maybe he is somehow communicating with another screamer on a distant (and unseen) shore.
But what if it’s because a Lady of the Lake (I know this is an ocean but just work with me here) gave him a sword and he lost it somehow?
The engine starts.
How did he lose it?
… what if he pawned it?
You should feel a click when it comes to you.
It’s a wonderful method. It’s fun. I can do it for hours because you’re just reading poems and playing games with them. It takes nothing beyond a web browser and something to write with.
The trick is not to ask what the poem means.
The trick is to put the poem in an alternate dimension and see what meaning emerges.
This is critical: your interpretation has to still work with the words on the page.
This is the secret sauce because it generates poems and not riffs. The constraint forces specificity and specificity is where poems live.
This is how I wrote Providence, which I just finished tonight.
It plays it completely straight with the sword origin story. Then there’s this line:
He pawned it
before it fully dried.
Smuggling a pawnshop into a poem that was setting up a mythic tone is just something I absolutely love.
Providence
He stands at the shore
of the endless gray ocean
like a man in a painting
who has come to be destroyed by hues.
He calls her name
and braces—
shoulders set
for the sudden heft
of something risen.
The sea gives nothing.
He calls again.
A gull changes lanes.
The first sword was a miracle,
a blessing,
an accident—
a wet handle rising into his hands.
He pawned it
before it fully dried.
And he is here
because he believes
if he says the right name
into the right gray
at the right hour,
a shining hilt
will lift itself
out of the water.
Behind him
the pawn shop lights sparkle
in his imagination
like the clink
of coins.
He waits
for another blade
to solve his life
in one clean piece of steel.
He screams her name
until his voice is hoarse
and the hues begin to darken.