So many of my in-class exercises start when I get in the car and turn the radio on. I was raised on rock ‘n’ roll, but I was taught to evaluate speaking patterns, word choice, verb tense, character— in short, there’s no such thing as a casual listening experience to me. (If you have a few hours to kill, find me on Twitter and bring up Lana Del Rey. I have a whole theory about persona being a way to circumvent the lack of authenticity that personality sometimes evades out of self-protection, and she and Father John Misty are our contemporary masters at persona.)
Sometimes, though, I just want to scream along with something that feels good. A lot of music is written with the idea in mind that it be a good experience to sing it back: it is a skill most good poets use as well, and in fact, usually when I use Aimee Mann to teach, I am teaching poetry. Her work is intensely metrical and balanced. So when I threw on Whatever for the hundredth time, I didn’t expect to be confronted with a line that changed the way I think about building character. In “I Should’ve Known,” she sings:
Well, I don’t know what else you hear
But it’s not me weeping
Later that day, I explained to my class that by choosing an evocative verb (“weeping” over an overstated “sobbing” or a less descriptive “crying”) and by telling us that’s not what we hear, we immediately learn two things. First—she is absolutely weeping. And? She’s defiant, even toward the audience she implicitly allows to overhear a line meant for a partner.
So what can we steal from this as writers? I have my students to take a piece of paper and write verbs at the top that they think have room for many different emotional contexts (my personal favorite is “flinch”). This works in any discipline, so depending on the course, they may be building a character in fiction, poetry, or CNF—which is particularly interesting, because I then tell them they have to tell us the character is using the action they have just chosen by finding a way to negate it. They don’t have to use the verb itself, but they cannot use Mann’s defiant phrasing. I sometimes remind them of the end of Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” which is built, of course, on what is not remembered. It is in this same way that we can build a person based on what they’re not—for instance, someone who is pathologically unable to enjoy a song they love without trying to build a class around it. For camaraderie, sure, but as much as anything, for the gift of experiencing songs in a way that keeps them alive even after the speaker is off.
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Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she’s been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020.