Pick a song - any song. Write the story based on the information in the song. It is like looking at a picture and writing a story to go with the picture.
Pick a song - any song. Write the story based on the information in the song. It is like looking at a picture and writing a story to go with the picture.
Creating a Story from a Song
Objective:
Students will be able to analyze a song and write a narrative that reflects the themes and emotions expressed in the lyrics.
Warm Up:
- What is your favorite song, and why do you like it?
- Can you think of a song that tells a story? What is the story about?
- How do music and lyrics work together to convey a message?
Key Vocabulary:
- Narrative: A spoken or written account of connected events; a story.
- Theme: The central topic or idea explored in a text.
- Emotion: A strong feeling, such as joy, sadness, or anger, that influences how we understand a story.
Turning Lyrics into a Narrative
Writing Prompt:
A. Choose a song that inspires you. Write a story about a character who faces a challenge and finds strength through the lyrics of that song.
OR:
B. Choose a song that inspires you. Turn the lyrics of the song into a story.
Standards Covered:
- Indiana Writing Standard 8.3: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences using effective techniques, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
- Indiana Writing Standard 8.4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
Title: “Sanctuary”
Act I – The Fall
Mara had lived her whole life in the small town of Elden’s Ridge, where the church steeple was the tallest structure and silence passed for peace. The kind of place where smiles were polite and grief was kept behind closed doors. She used to believe in the structure of it all—the clean lines, the quiet Sundays, the promise that if you played by the rules, everything would be fine.
But it wasn’t fine. Not when Olivia died.
Olivia had been Mara’s partner in everything—her first kiss, her late-night co-conspirator, the only person who had ever seen her, really seen her. Their love had always been quiet, coded into glances and late drives down country roads. It wasn’t the kind of love that got paraded through town. Not here.
When Olivia’s car slid off the highway that icy November night, Mara wasn’t even allowed to sit in the front row of the funeral. She watched from the back pew, hands trembling, nails digging into her palms. No one acknowledged her grief. They wouldn’t even say they were a couple.
Back in her apartment—still filled with Olivia’s laughter caught in voicemail messages and half-read books—Mara stopped playing music. She stopped painting. She stopped everything. The silence grew thick and suffocating.
Act II – The Record Player
Weeks later, she found Olivia’s old record player in the attic. Dusty, cracked leather handle. A stack of vinyls wrapped in brown twine. She didn’t mean to play anything. She just wanted to hold something Olivia had touched.
The needle scratched.
And then—
They say, "The holy water's watered down / And this town's lost its faith..."
Mara froze. Olivia’s handwriting was scrawled on the sleeve:
“Play this when the world goes grayscale.”
She sat down on the floor as the song washed over her. It didn’t sound like church music. It sounded like truth. Raw, bleeding, defiant.
So if our time is runnin' out, day after day / We'll make the mundane our masterpiece...
Mara clutched the sleeve to her chest. For the first time in weeks, her tears didn’t feel like surrender. They felt like release.
Act III – The Rise
Mara started listening every day. The lyrics became a mantra. The line “You're takin' me out of the ordinary” looped in her head like a prayer she could believe in. When she heard “I want you layin’ me down ‘til we’re dead and buried,” she didn’t hear despair. She heard a vow. A kind of holy that didn’t need stained glass or Latin hymns.
She painted again. Big, chaotic pieces. A mural on the side of the old laundromat that showed two figures wrapped in flame, kissing beneath a broken steeple. People whispered. The town council tried to get it taken down.
But someone kept putting fresh flowers at the base.
She wrote a letter to the pastor. She told him Olivia had loved her, and she had loved Olivia, and no sermon would ever take that away. She said she’d found more holiness in one late-night drive with her love than she ever did in that cold church.
“You got me kissin' the ground of your sanctuary…”
Her sanctuary was the rooftop where they used to stargaze. The tree in the park where Olivia carved a crooked heart. The record player that kept spinning long after the town had turned its back.
Act IV – The Reclamation
On what would’ve been Olivia’s 26th birthday, Mara stood on a makeshift stage in the town square. The mural behind her, lights strung across the trees. She sang the song live, her voice shaking but strong. When she got to the bridge—
“Shatter me with your touch, oh Lord, return me to dust / The angels up in the clouds are jealous, knowin’ we found…”
—the crowd was silent. Then someone started crying. Then someone else clapped. One old woman, hand on her heart, whispered, “Hopeless hallelujah.”
Mara wasn’t healed, but she was no longer hidden.
She had taken the grief, the beauty, the fury, the love—and made it her masterpiece.
End.
Everything shifted when he met Eli, a free-spirited, defiant artist who moved into the town to restore a crumbling church into a community arts space. Eli wasn’t religious, but he carried something deeply reverent in the way he lived—his love of color, beauty, imperfection, and truth. Jude was captivated. Their connection began subtly, almost cautiously. But over time, Jude realized that what he'd been taught to find only in heaven, he was feeling right here on earth—through love, physicality, and deep emotional intimacy.
The town disapproved. They called it blasphemy. Some said the holy water had gone “watered down,” and the town had “lost its faith.” But Jude and Eli refused to apologize for the joy and devotion they had discovered in each other. Their love became a sanctuary in a place that no longer felt like home.
“Out of the Ordinary” is Jude’s hymn to that love—unashamed, sacred, and fierce. It’s a reclamation of the divine from the realm of dogma into something bodily, tangible, and painfully real. The repeated imagery of “the angels being jealous” reflects the idea that even the heavens couldn’t offer what he found in this earthly, complicated, breathless connection.
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