The Piano Tribute Players and Linkin Park Writing Exercise

Voila! A writing exercise with an arbitrarily long name!

The Piano Tribute Players and Linkin Park Writing Exercise

How to do it:

1. Find a music video.
2. Find an instrumental piece.
3. Play the video on mute in time with the song.
4. Write something based on what you see and hear.

I did this with Linkin Park's video for "Leave Out All the Rest" and Piano Tribute Player's cover of The Fray's "You Found Me," and it turned out to be a fantastic combination. The piano changes the entire mood of the video, and the decrescendo at the end of the song is an eerie complement to the end of the video. I picked these two at random, but the exercise can probably be done with most any combination.

Using an instrumental piece completely takes the attention off lyrics. By using only sound and visuals, you give yourself more freedom in how you interpret the two as a whole.

(Doing this totally made me think of the Mary Poppins trailer recut to look like a horror movie.)

So! This is what I wrote:


Your new job in this place is tedious, and you know they only gave it to you because they don't trust you to do more after your last series of mistakes. But you get bored, so you entertain yourself by checking over everyone else's work while they sleep. It settles your mind in a way that sleeping can't.

Then one night you find an error in the ship's trajectory. A fatal one. The others obviously don't believe it's there, and Jacob, who should be especially grateful to you for pointing it out considering it's his mistake, asks cautiously if you've been sleeping enough. You tell Jacob he's not doing his job right and that the number of hours you've slept has nothing to do with that. He takes offense, predictably, and you push away from the table in disgust.

No one bothers you for the rest of the night, and no one fixes the error. No one even checks to see if it's there. One by one they go to sleep, and Jacob shakes his head at you on his way up the ladder.

You stay up. You go into the engine room and call up a field of stars. You stand in the middle of the galaxy and look at all the places you could have gone instead.

When the alarm sounds, you climb down to the observation deck. Whorls of fire expand and fill the window. The heat makes you grimace.

The one thing you ever did right, and it didn't change a thing.

One by one they join you, stand beside you, and you can tell Jacob is looking at you. He doesn't apologize, and if you didn't know him as well as you do, you'd wonder if he blames you.

Maybe he does. You can't read his expression because you never look away from the light.

Then, all at once, it devours you.


And that's the exercise! Give it a shot!