I realized today that I never gave context to the “Object Writing” posts I’ve been making. I’m sure for a lot of you outside of the creative world & even for those within, their materialization has been bizarre. I’ve blindsided you with videos & blog posting that of course make no sense out of context, so please allow me to do some explaining!
This blog will once again contain a story about Leena Regan by the way!
Back in the summer with the soft launch of Leena & her husband Max’s Australian music school, The Songbird Society, Leena started doing artist & writer outreach. Part of that outreach included creating a group that would center around object writing. Object writing is a Berklee School of Music songwriting practice where you are given a random object & told to write a paragraph or so around it. This paragraph must include sensory details (sight, smell, taste, feel, sound) as well as somewhat of a short story it is all wrapped up in. This is a practice meant to be done daily to get the creative juices flowing. It forces you to give random objects context in your mind & create a narrative around them.
Fast forward six months to now. I’m a part of an artist accelerator at the moment that is forcing us to think of our brand & marketing efforts in new in interesting ways, this also translates, naturally, to content! I’d been sharing some of the object writing that I had been doing the last couple of months with Evan who suggested that some of them were good enough to share! I brought it up with my accelerator group & they loved the idea, especially since Instagram Reels & TikToks are such great discovery tools these days!
I thought & thought & thought about how I wanted to share these little snippets of writing I’d done; I thought about maybe just posting the script & reading over it, I thought about just making them blogs or even YouTube vids, but in the end I came back to a method one of my current favorite TikTok users utilizes!
The account in question, @ewistone, has a series of videos he calls “Beautiful Words that Describe Obscure Emotions.” In this series he posts a video that relates to the word in question, voice overs it, & has legible text scrolling along the way. I decided that was the format I wanted to take my inspiration from.
I picked the object writing prompt that I thought would be the easiest to film as my tester, Chapel, & set out to East Nashville to film my video. In hindsight I definitely should have done the voice over first so I knew how long to make the video, but I guess you live & learn.
It’s now been a month since I started the object writing videos & while they haven’t necessarily taken off in the manner I’d hoped they would, I’m still believing they’re going to be a vehicle for me to reach new fans & friends. I’ve now posted a total of four; Chapel, Biscuits, Track, & Teddy Bear. You can find them here, on this blog every Wednesday or on TikTok & Instagram Reels the same day!
As this is still a fairly fresh endeavor I’d love to know your thoughts! I’d love to know ways in which I can improve them, how you’d like them to show up, even any objects you want me to write about! I’d also love to know, honestly, how you feel about them! I apologize for the wonky friday blog schedule this past month as well, I’m still trying to figure out where the object writing fits into my weekly schedule & am still adapting!
Have the loveliest of weekends,
-C