Rock Riffs Ripe for Writing Ideas

Wanna get creative and have fun with some of your favorite songs ? Then try "rock riff writing." There are no hard and fast rules. Choose a song that you really enjoy and use it to write a description, scene, dialogue, character sketch, or story (or film?) treatment. I've included lyrics from a song that you might know by Billy Joel called Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. It's a story song already that involves two fairly well-defined characters, Brenda and Eddie. Read over the lyrics below:

Eddie were the popular steadies /And the king and the queen of the prom /Riding around with the car top down and the radio on / Nobody looked any finer /Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner / We never knew we could want more than that out of life / Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive. / Brenda and Eddie were still going steady in the summer of '75 / when they decided the marriage would be at the end of July / Everyone said they were crazy / "Brenda you know that you're much too lazy/ and Eddie could never afford to live that kind of life." / Oh, but there we were wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye. / Well they got an apartment with deep pile carpets / And a couple of paintings from Sears / A big waterbed that they bought with the bread /They had saved for a couple of years / They started to fight when the money got tight /And they just didn't count on the tears.

OK. From here, your opportunities to write are endless. Describe your favorite Italian restaurant, from soup to nuts. Or write a scene at their wedding, perhaps, that foreshadows their eventual breakup. Or compose a dialogue in which Eddie proposes to Brenda. Maybe have Brenda proposing to Eddie, which might explain how Eddie wasn't ready to get married in the first place. Character sketch Eddie. Dress him appropriately, have him talk, act, react, etc. the way he should. Mix together dialogue and your narration to sketch Eddie. If you're really ambitious, come up with a story or movie treatment. I would define a treatment as a basic plot road map with some interesting explanatory comments sprinkled in. If you're casting the movie, who would be your first choices to play the roles of Brenda and Eddie? Mine might be Marisa Tomei and Nicholas Cage.

If you're daring, you can post your rock riff on this site for comments from your classmates. Of course, that post will count as a journal writing. By the way, the photo is of Caffe Napoli on Mulberry Street in New York's Little Italy.