Object Prompt: Write a Song About the Thing in Your Pocket

The rules

Keep them strict. The whole value of the exercise is that every decision you would normally agonise over has already been made for you.

• Pick the object in under ten seconds. No browsing, no swapping.
• Do not name the object anywhere in the lyric. Describe it through what it does and where it has been.
• Write sixteen lines. Four of them must be about a person, not the object.
• One line must contain a number.
• Stop at twenty minutes even if you are mid-line.

Why the no-naming rule matters

If you are allowed to write the word 'phone', the lyric collapses into statement: my phone is always on, my phone never rings. Remove the noun and you are forced into behaviour — the thing that lights up face-down on the table at 2 a.m. That is a lyric, not a label, and it is also what makes the object into a metaphor without you having to announce one.

The same rule quietly fixes a common beginner habit: explaining the song to the listener instead of letting the listener finish the thought.

Where songs from this prompt usually go wrong

The most common failure is drifting from observation into a message by line nine. When you feel the urge to state a theme, describe a physical detail instead — a crack, a smudge, a price sticker.

What to do with the result

You will almost never keep all sixteen lines. Read them out loud and circle the two or three that made you uncomfortable — those are the ones carrying weight. Those lines become the first verse of something real, and the object usually disappears from the song entirely by draft three, which is fine. It did its job.

If nothing survived, the exercise still worked. You spent twenty minutes writing instead of deciding whether to write.

Questions that come up here