SCP #58: It, That Once Was Sweet For Him
This piece is not what I was originally working on yesterday. I had planned out a whole story-song and done lots of timed writing exercises to generate material to work with, but by the time I got that far it was after 11pm and I was exhausted. I looked up from my piano and into the mirror and my eyes were red and watery, so instead of pushing through I changed tact and did something much simpler.
My starting point for the day's work was the word foil, and I created a mind map of related ideas:
The very first thing I pulled from the outer branches of the mind map was "chocolate in a bonfire", and I did a two minute writing exercise on that theme to start me off. That led on to my grand story-song idea and so I abandoned this initial piece of prose, but I went back to it for this improvisation. For the harmony I assigned the letters of foil a number based on their position in the alphabet, which suggested a harmonic minor scale.
I am consistently surprised at where these mind maps and timed writing exercises lead, and they are a constant reminder that no matter how creatively empty I am feeling there are always ideas waiting to emerge if I can just sit down and do a bit of legwork to tease them out.