Wordplay Challenge 2: Behind the Music

Your current playlist reflects not just where you are right now in your life, but who you are right now in your life. Fight the temptation to just list those songs on a layout and proclaim your journaling finished. This week we're getting lyrical.

Spend the next few days listening to and collecting lyrics, focusing on the language in the songs that you love. Jot down the lyrics that speak to you, that stay with you, the ones that prevent you from hearing anything further in a song because you're still caught in that "wow" moment. Then, figure out why these lyrics have this effect on you. Work to find a way to capture in words why these lyrics resound long after the song is over.

Here are a few of the lyrics that have been in my head lately:

You're my favourite moment
You're my Saturday.

-- Goldfrapp, "Number 1"

Sure, there are so many compliments one can direct at one's beloved, but nothing says true love like being called someone's "Saturday". Every time I hear this lyric, I think of my husband with a silly grin on my face. Every single time.

our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds

-- Death Cab for Cute, "What Sarah Said"

The song always stops for me after these words. These lyrics not only contain an amazing metaphor, they also have a tendency to make me both wistful and hyperobservant.

If you're married to the idea of using a photo on your layout, then think about taking a pic of a radio or your iPod, or take a screen shot of your playlist on your computer. You could also -- eek! -- use a photo of yourself, since this is about you and your musical "identity."

My Fortunate Sentence

Who knew that one sentence could be so challenging? My sentence morphed quite a bit in the process, but I like what finally emerged after tweaking words along the way. Some of its variants included "you will perceive far more than your eyes can see" and "you will discover your vision when you look beyond what eyes can see." I'm still liking the latter one, but I think the one that I finally went with is more concise. Plus, I love the alliterative v-v-vuh partnering of "vision" and "view."

I just realized that this is my first page of 2009 -- definitely a hopeful beginning!

Why?

I don't know about you, but finding "the words to say it" on my scrapbook layouts is one of the most challenging aspects of scrapbooking for me. This year, one of my creative resolutions is to ensure that I not only create something weekly, but create something meaningfully as well. I don't want to take for granted the power of my voice on the pages that I create, and I no longer want to add journaling as an afterthought.

Thus, the Wordplay Challenges were born.

In her poem "Spelling," Margaret Atwood writes: "A word after a word after a word is power."

Each week, I will post a prompt that is designed to help me -- and anyone else who wants to play along -- embrace a bit of word power and engage in a little wordplay. In the process, we can become more mindful of the way we "compose" our selves in our scrapbooks, and we can also enjoy the process, knowing that we are making definite creative efforts toward "finding the words to say it."

Wordplay Challenge 1: A Fortunate Sentence

For our first-ever challenge, consider the following:

With the advent of the new year, now is the perfect time to communicate messages of hope and good fortune. This challenge isn't about filling a page. It's about choosing words carefully, and making every word count. The fortune above could have read, "Your smile will bring you luck," but words and phrases like "winsome" and "sure protection" are far more precise and eloquent.

The "fortune" that you compose could be practical ("You will discover a fabulous new conditioner that enables you to disentangle your hair with ease") or lofty ("Your joyous heart has many rooms, which will always be filled with love and laughter"), but it should ultimately reflect what you consider "good fortune" in the year(s) to come.

As you compose your fortunate sentence, feel free to dispense with the second person pronoun "you" and adopt a different approach, in the form of an intention, whether meant for an individual ("May I finally learn to recognize the difference between living to eat and eating to live") or a group ("May we lose ourselves more often in laughter, and find ourselves more often in love.")

If you don't want to limit yourself to a single sentence, don't. A litany of fortunes might be the way to go for you, or a single, repeated fortune could take on a mantra-like feel.

As an extension to the challenge, if you're looking for a creative twist, consider the way that you "package" your fortune. Just as a fortune is hidden within a cookie, so might your page, card, or other project seek a novel way to enclose the fortune.

Have fun with this one, and be sure to share what you come up with by leaving a comment with a link to your blog or by posting a link on the challenge threads at Two Peas in a Bucket or Studio Calico (which I will start to post beginning on January 1).