Plain words over fancy ones
Okay. Last time we found the one line your song is really about. Tonight we do something to it — we make sure it's said plain.
I'll tell you my bias up front. I like it plain. That's just me. Some of you are going to want to dress your line up. Make it sound more like a song, whatever that means to you — bigger words, a metaphor stacked on a metaphor, something that sounds like it belongs on a greeting card. I understand the impulse. You've got a true thing to say and you want it to sound important.
Here's the problem. The fancier the words, the less anybody believes you.
Why plain wins
Think about the songs that actually stuck around — the old ones, the ones your grandmother knew all the words to without trying. They're not fancy. "I'll fly away." "Down in the valley." Nobody's showing off in those lines. They just say the thing.
Fancy words are you standing between the listener and the truth, waving your arms. Plain words get out of the way.
I sang one of my own songs at a family gathering a while back. Nervous the whole time — first time I'd done that in front of anybody but Jill. Everybody clapped, said nice things, the kind of nice you say because somebody handed you a guitar and sang. Polite. Fine.
But afterward my brother, who maybe says forty words a week, came up and asked if I had the words written down somewhere. Said he wanted to keep them. That wasn't politeness. That was a plain line landing on a person. Meant more to me than every nice comment in the room put together, and I still think about it when I'm tempted to get clever with a lyric instead of just saying it.
The test
Take the line you found last lesson — the one the song is really about. Read it out loud, like you're telling it to one person across a table, not singing it.
Does it sound like something a person would actually say? Or does it sound like something written for a song?
If it's the second one, it needs work.
How to plain it up — steps
1. Write the line the fancy way first, if that's how it came out. Don't fight your first draft. Just get it down.
2. Ask what you actually mean, in the flattest words possible. Not "the ache of time's relentless march." Try: "I'm getting old and I don't like it." Ugly, but true, and you can work from true.
3. Cut every word that's there to sound like a song and not there to say the thing. Adjectives are usually the first to go. "The vast and empty sky" — you don't need vast and empty both. Pick one. Or cut both and just say "the sky."
4. Read it out loud to somebody, or to your dog, or to your steering wheel. If you'd be embarrassed to say that sentence to a real person in a real conversation, it's probably too dressed up.
5. Keep the plainest version that still says the true thing. Not the shortest necessarily — the plainest. Sometimes plain needs six words instead of three.
A caution
Plain isn't the same as boring, and it isn't the same as lazy. Don't confuse "I said the first thing that came to mind" with "I said the true thing plainly." Those aren't the same move. The first is skipping the work. The second is doing the work and then cutting the fat off it. You'll know the difference because the plain version, when you get there, feels like it clicked into place. The lazy version just sits there.
Also — and I say this every module because it's still true — don't sand off every rough edge. Plain doesn't mean smooth. If a slightly odd word is the true word, keep the odd word. We talked about keeping the wrong finger a few weeks back. Same idea here. Plain is about honesty, not about polish.
Try this tonight
Take your one true line. Write three versions: - The fancy version, if you've got one - The flat, ugly, too-honest version - The plain version, which is usually somewhere between those two but closer to the ugly one than you'd think
Read all three out loud. You'll know which one's true. It's usually the shortest one, and it's usually the one that made you a little uncomfortable to say.
Before next time: bring your plain line to class, and bring the fancy version too, so we can see the distance between them. That gap is basically the whole lesson.