Writing About a Place You Can't Name

There is a particular bench, on the path that runs along the cliff at the edge of my town, where I have written more lyrics than at any desk I have ever owned. I am not going to tell you which town. The town isn't the point. The bench isn't the point. The point is the salt on the lip of the mug of tea I am holding when I sit there, and the way the wind makes my eyes water just enough that everything goes briefly soft, and the colour of the sea three weeks before Easter. That is the place.

Some songs need a real, specific somewhere, and that real, specific somewhere is often a place you cannot or do not want to name. The flat where you grew up. The bedroom of a friend who has died. A relationship's kitchen. A childhood lane that has, in the years since, become a road. The instinct is to name it, because naming feels like specificity. The trick is that naming, almost always, gives you the postcard and not the place.

The postcard problem

A postcard tells you where it was sent from. It does not put you in the room. If a song's lyric says I was in Lisbon, the listener has a flag, a city, an idea, but no sense of standing anywhere in particular. The brain has gone to its file folder marked LISBON, and the file folder is the average of every Lisbon anyone has ever told it about, and the average of all Lisbons is nowhere at all.

Now try this. Replace I was in Lisbon with the steep tile street, and the smell of the bakery underneath. You will not have said Lisbon. The listener will not know it is Lisbon, and they do not need to. They will, however, be standing inside a specific hill. They will smell the bakery. That is the place. The name was the postcard.

What sensory detail actually does

Lyrics work on a particular kind of magic, which is that a listener builds the room out of the details you give them and then walks around inside it as if it were their own. Your job is to choose, very carefully, which two or three details to hand them. A flag is not a detail. A name is not a detail. What you want is the sensory hook: the smell of someone's coat, the sound of the kitchen radio in the next flat, the angle of light on the dust on the windowsill at four in the afternoon.

Two or three of those, placed across a verse, will do more work than any number of names. The listener now has a place. It will not be your place. It will be theirs, built out of your details, and that is exactly the right outcome.

The five-sense scan

Here is what I do when I am trying to write about a place I will not name. I sit somewhere quiet, close my eyes, and go through the five senses, one at a time, asking a small question of each. Not what was the place like, but what was specifically in it.

Sight: what was the light doing, in this place, at the time of day I am writing about? Not bright or dim. Was it coming through curtains? Off snow? Off a screen? Sound: what was the soundtrack you could not switch off? A boiler in the next room. The man downstairs who watched cricket. A pigeon on the sill. Smell, the underrated one: what would you have noticed if you had come in from outside? Touch: what did the surfaces feel like under your hand? Taste: did the place have a taste, or did you bring a taste into it... a particular mug, a particular biscuit, the air on the back of your throat?

Most of those questions will give you nothing. One or two will give you something exact. Those are the lines.

The listener will not know it is your place, and they do not need to. They will, however, be standing inside a specific hill.

When a name does help

I want to be fair to names. There are cases where the name is the detail: a street name that has the right music on the tongue, or a place your specific listener knows. If the name does the same work a sensory detail would do, use the detail. If the name does something the detail can't (a particular weight, a particular sound on the lip), keep the name. Or... keep both, on different lines, and let them work in layers.

A small exercise

Pick a place you cannot or will not name. Sit with a notebook for ten minutes and write down twenty specific sensory things about it. Not feelings. Things. The cracked tile in the corner of the bathroom. The way the dog used to sit just inside the door. The smell of damp on the cellar steps. Twenty is the number, because the first ten will be obvious and the next ten will be where the actual song lives.

Then pick three. If you want help finding the kind of detail you keep missing, the SenseSpark prompts are built for exactly this work: small, specific, often slightly odd sensory questions that catch you off guard and pull a real detail up out of memory. And once you have the detail, the RhymeForge tool will help you place it in a line that actually scans, without forcing the rhyme to take over the image.

The bench, again

I went back to the bench last weekend, before I wrote this. The sea was the same colour, the wind the same temperature, and the salt was on the lip of the mug of tea again. I noticed something I had never noticed before. There is a small chip in the wood at the right-hand corner of the seat, exactly the shape of a key. I have been sitting there for years and I had never seen it. I will not put the bench in a lyric. I will probably put the chipped wood, the shape of a key, on the corner of a seat overlooking the sea.