Last week, I was part of the latest Weaklings meeting. The Weaklings, for those of you who are curious, was started by fellow Square Pegs Randall Goodgame and Andrew Peterson as a collective of writers seeking to challenge, inspire, encourage, cultivate and critique one another’s craft. We have sporadically met here and there to eat nachos and sip cola, and, on those occasions, have often given ourselves writing assignments. In this latest edition, myself, Andrew Peterson, Randall Goodgame, Andrew Osenga, Andy Gullahorn, Ron Block and David Wilcox (in town for a Nashville show) all sat around eating sliced carrots, sun-dried tomato humus and fresh-baked cookies and were as nervous as nervous could be (at least, I was), each awaiting our turn to play one of our songs. It is a soul-swallowing experience to play a new song for writers who are better than you (and everybody in the room knows it). It was a mighty low experience for me to play my semi-half-baked song for these gentlemen, but they were as kind as they could possibly muster for this, my late night, last-minute attempt at fulfilling the call to the assignment. I don’t know if it matters a hill of beans, but I felt a little better at least having come to the group armed with something, even if that something wasn’t worth noticing. The song will never win any awards (they never do), but it was, once I finally got over the initial humiliation and self-pummeling, a good step for me, an admittedly lazy writer, in the right direction. For if I had not had this assignment, I would never, ever have written this song or even tried. For good or bad, it was the effort of being forced to work that stirred my brain to thought, to creating, to thinking outside the lines, to imagine a storyline. To tell the story plainly and deftly – in short, to get out of the way – that is the writer’s challenge.

This particular writing assignment, courtesy of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, was to write a song based on the story of a telephone repairman who dabbles as an antiques collector on the side. On a routine call, the repairman enters an elderly man’s house and notices, sitting beneath piles of old newspapers and debris, several pieces of furniture that appear to be early American and highly collectible. The repairman asks if the pieces are for sale and finds out that the owner can’t/won’t sell them because they are needed for the building’s tenants. Ten years pass and the repairman, who never forgets what he saw that day, asks the owner again if she’s willing to sell and this time she agrees. Long story shorter, the furniture is indeed historic and very valuable and sells at auction for $1 million.

The assignment: write something, however far-fetched, however obscurely referenced, however serious or silly, based on this excerpt. Side note: “Miracle of Forgetting” is another example of a writing assignment song I wrote based on a UJBR excerpt. Here is what I wrote Monday night (and am still in the process of writing):

Diamond in the Rough

There’s a clapboard house in Rhode Island
On a street full of silver maples
Where a man wearing slippers
Is combing his hair

He looks in the mirror
And stares at his wrinkles
And laughs at the way
That his life has unfolded

What is good?
What is noble?
What is lovely?
If anything good from this world should ever arise
It is a diamond in the rough

He’s a millionaire but nobody knows it
He plays solitaire most every night
He owns nothing but an antique table
And a checkbook to say his grace in ink

Chorus

Now, I have never been to Newport
Or seen Rhode Island in the spring
But I am a lifelong curmudgeon
Since I have kept most everything

That was good
And noble
And right
If anything good from my soul should ever arise
It is a diamond in the rough