STRATEGY EIGHTEEN
The Question Title and Question Plot as Framing Devices

Questions and Answers

Second only to the word sex as an attention-getting device, comes the question. From my morning New York Times, here are a few of the questions that caught my eye: “Enjoy faraway places?”; “Is Time the most radioactive magazine in America?”; “Stumped? Call 1-900-994-Clue”; “What's Doing in San Francisco?”; “Want help in choosing the right camp for your child?”

Questions, of course, serve equally well to catch the ear. Questions make for strong opening lines, strong song titles, and they can supply a strong framing device for your plot.

The majority of question titles start with one of the five W's—Who, What, When, Where or Why; many begin with such interrogations as Do, Can, How, Have, Will, and Would. Most lyrical questions are rhetorical—they neither supply nor expect an answer: “Who Wouldn't Wanna Be Me” even omits a question mark.

Prewriting Suggestion

If you have a personal question on your mind pressing for expression, you're all set. Or if you happen to be a thinking/intuitive type, it's quite possible that your idea notebook has stored away a supply of who/what/when titles, because asking questions is an NT trait. On the other hand, if you're a sensate type who tends to prefer making statements, the exercise of questioning may be more of a challenge for you.

But whichever your favored perceptive mode, intuition or sensation, brainstorming from the five W's should turn up something. Then comes the process of working out a scenario: Who's asking the question? And of whom? What's the best form? And what's the ideal viewpoint? The following role-model situational lyric clearly springs from the writer's personal experience.

Example No. 1: The Question Title (Verse/Chorus)
WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ANGER?

It's rough, tough,
Hard to adjust.
WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ANGER?
This rage each day
Won't go away.
WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ANGER?
Whoa ohh ohh Whoa ohh
Whoa ohh ohh ohh ohh ohh ohh.

I'm minding my own business walking down the street
When a man says to me words I can't repeat
I keep on walking. He waits for my reply.
Then he calls me ‘bitch’ as I avert my eyes.
I hurry to the corner. (No way I'm looking back!)
He screams he's gonna get me. And his friends start to laugh.
Now there're three men deciding I'm their prey.
And all I can think of is: Get out of their way!

(repeat chorus)

I want my freedom to walk and dress how I please.
Being out on the street doesn't make me public property.
Looking over my shoulder doesn't make me feel good:
I want to feel safe in my own neighborhood!

[Men's Voices Speaking]:
“Hey baby, lookin' for some action?
Lookin' good, babe.
Come 'ere, come 'ere, sweetheart:
I got somethin' for ya.”

What makes them think they can treat me this way?
Where's the respect? Where's equality?
I can turn off violence when it's on the TV
But what do I do when it's aimed at me!

(repeat chorus)
^© 1990 Carrie Starner/Kim Starner/Jay Ward. Used with permission.

Comment

This assertive straight-talking song always evokes an enthusiastic response from audiences (especially women) when Carrie performs this song. Her choosing to start with the chorus, rather than the more traditional verse opening, effectively sets up the situation. Notice how the writer/singer—a rising young artist—underscores her distress by means of a mournful refrain of vowel sounds: Whoa ohh ohh Whoa ohh/Whoa ohh ohh ohh ohh ohh ohh. The street scene, the conversational style, the integration of the male voices, the use of the nonsense syllables contribute to a strong pop entry for the Top 40.

What's a Question Plot?

In a question title, like “What Do I Do With the Anger,” the question is clarified, amplified and then reinforced with repetition. In a question plot, the question asked in the opening of the lyric is finally answered at its end. Although a common literary strategy–it continues to be an uncommon lyrical strategy.

Some Question Plot Examples

“Who?,” the 1925 classic by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern from the musical Sunny, may be the shortest and simplest of question plots: the opening line asks “Who stole my heart away? …” and 30-bars (of cut-time) later comes the answer, “No one but you.”

In Stephen Sondheim's Broadway show Follies, a long-suffering wife's diatribe to her bore of a husband opens with the sarcastic query “Could I Leave You?” and closes with the penultimate answer, “Yes.” Then, in a tag ending the singer appends the question “Will I leave you?” and responds, “Guess!”

The most fully developed question plot has got to be the classic from the revue New Faces of 1952, “Guess Who I Saw Today?” (Boyd/Grand). This story song begins with a wife asking her husband the song's title. She then recounts the details of her day of shopping in the city. We expect that she will say she ran into an old friend in a restaurant, but in the surprise ending, it turns out she discovered her husband in a tryst with another woman hence, the denouement, “I saw you.”

Another example, reprinted in CLW is my cabaret song “She Knows” in which the singer has just been told by her married lover that his wife guessed he was having an affair. In the song's opening line, she asks, “Tell me how she got suspicious/When we've both been so discreet?” As the song unfolds she realizes how the wife had guessed: “You love me so much, it shows./Funny, that's how she knows.”

Here's another lyric of my own. This one came music first. The ruminative melody seemed to be asking a question, so that's what the lyric had to do. The answer to the song's title evolved without conscious planning.

Example No. 2: The Question Plot (AABA)
WHAT DO I NEED?

WHAT DO I NEED
To make it sink in?
To show me it's over
With no way to win?
WHAT DO I NEED
To prove that you're gone–
The thunder to roar?
The roof to cave in before
I stop hanging on?

Am I a child,
Unwilling to see
That when a kite's stranded
High in a tree
You've got to walk away
And leave it behind?
Don't stand there and cry!
At least there were all those times
You got it to fly.

But here I go having myself
Another fantasy.
Seems I'm living on love-scene reruns
More and more—
Finding a way of believing
You'll be back with me—
Just like before.

WHAT DO I NEED
To make me let go?
To take up my life again
And face what I know?
I need more than a prayer
Or new affair could ever do:
I need a miracle
To get me over you.
By Sheila Davis
^©1979 Carlyle Music Publishing Corp. Used with permission.

Comment

The lyric illustrates the development technique of stretching the thought by examples; that is, to give the listener a “for instance”—either literal or figurative: Likening the end of a relationship to an inaccessible kite acts to vivify the abstract idea of loss. The bridge offers a contrast to the questions of the A's by making statements—having the singer analyze how she spends her time—reliving the past and giving herself false hopes for the future. The successive related lines, “to make it sink in/to show me its over/to make me let go,” illustrate both the value of parallel constructions and the principle of putting ideas in ascending order of importance. “I need a miracle,” of course, is the answer to the title's question.

Because it's a melody I'm particularly fond of, I'm pleased that Muzak includes “What Do I Need” in their catalog. Muzak gets a lot of kidding by the public, but never by songwriters! In an interview in the Boston Phoenix, Paul Simon expressed my sentiments: “I really get off on getting in an elevator and hearing one of my things on Muzak … I feel like I succeeded: This tune made it—it made it into people's ears.”

WrapUp

Many question titles are not asking for an answer, like “What Do I Do With the Anger?” Others, like “What Do I Need,” seem to want to be resolved. There are a few well-known recorded question-title songs that I personally find unsatisfactory in that the lyric promises at the beginning more than it delivers at the end. The next time you start to develop a lyric with a question title, consider the possibility that it may be a question plot, a question begging for some emotional closure–especially if it asks something like, “When Do I Start to Get Over You?” Instead of merely repeating the title throughout a chorus, a stronger approach would be to use the AABA form so you can have the singer answer the question in the last A–“Maybe tomorrow …