Sitting at home in front of blank word processor document, the main points of an academic paper or creative writing project rolling around in my head, I can't help but get the song "Jeremy" stuck in my head. I've never been a big Pearl Jam fan* but there is something striking about this song, especially from a writer's perspective.
Sure, of course, there's the fact that lyrics are topical and poignant, the experience of hundreds condensed into four or five minutes and released years before those hundreds would know the rash of high-profile school violence that ravaged the media. There's the tell-tale bass-line beginning and the memorable video. But why I'm always reminded of "Jeremy" is the first line: "At home, / drawing pictures / of mountain tops / with him on top, / lemon yellow sun ... " The song doesn't start off with "I" or "You" or even "He" ... not a "The" or "A/An" ... nothing like the typical starting point of so many stories. In fact, we don't even get a third-person pronoun until the fourth line, an active sentence with Jeremy's name until the refrain, and details that this tale isn't told in the third-person omniscient (instead it is first-person limited -- not from Jeremy's point-of-view) until after the first refrain (second or third stanza depending on what lyrics you're looking at).
This is a good reminder for me whenever I start to write: don't just relay the story -- drop people in. Not that there isn't something to be said for starting from the beginning but we are so inundated with texts beginning with articles and pronouns/subjects I find it more interesting to use different sentence structures to spice it up a little. Not only does it grab readers from the beginning but it also prompts me as a writer to be more creative with how the sentence, then paragraph, then page is constructed. So now, as I start to write an abstract for an undergraduate research project I'm working on, I have the video for that song running through my head.
Thanks for the inspiration, Eddie. Sorry that whenever I do impressions of you it sounds exactly like my impression of Scott Stapp.
* My mom bought me Vs to help me expand my musical tastes beyond the Ren & Stimpy CD I had and my slow but increasing fascination with the Johnny Mneumonic soundtrack. They (my mom and her best friend who was visiting for the week) played it for me and tried to get me to listen to the whole song. I felt trapped and called out so I pushed through the adults and left the room, crying. I point that out as the reason I never caught on to the "grunge" movement. I was 12 at the time.
