This exercise comes from Jeff Tweedy’s book How to Write One Song. It is intended to help us get out of the habitual way we use language to make something more interesting. We are going to start with Verbs and Nouns, the building blocks of language. The basic exercise is to come up with ten verbs based on a prompt and then ten nouns based on an unrelated prompt.
In order to keep the exercise quick, I am breaking them up into two day exercises. The first will be compiling lists. Here is an example (from the book): Prompt for verbs = “Physician”, Prompt for nouns = “things in your field of vision”. The list may look like this:
Verbs: Examine, Thump, Prescribe
Nouns: Cushion, Guitar, Wall
For today, here are your prompts (Please do your lists prior to reading any one else’s so that you are not influenced):
For verbs: Water
For nouns: Things you have seen today
Write ten under each category.