Make A Creative Leap

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

—Ray Bradbury

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Growing a Tale

When no one would listen, I planted my words in an empty field near my home. Later, they grew into phrases, then sentences, then paragraphs.

One day I went to water my words and found an entire village had sprouted up, with houses and shops and people.

I sat on a bench and wrote down the stories of all the characters I’d grown.

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I’m having one of those weeks when it’s hard to find time to write much. So instead of a longer conversation about this metaphorical story I’ve written, I’ll just say it’s important—vitally important—that we writers and other creative types keep pursuing our art even when no one listens to us. When the people in our lives don’t “get” what we’re doing, when publishers reject our offerings, when it seems like no one will ever be interested in what we’ve written.

Always listen to your inner voice.

Always pursue your passion.

Keep writing from your heart and one day a village will sprout up. It may not happen when you expect it to. It may not look the way you visualized it. But if you continue to honor your need to express yourself creatively, in your own way, you will be cultivating your inner artist. You will be strengthening your unique voice. You will be growing a body of work, even if it doesn’t appear to be a cohesive piece or collection for a very long time.

Never, ever let anyone or anything stop you. Because the world truly needs your unique vision.

10 Ways to Get Your Muse Out of Neutral

1. Go somewhere public—a cafe, a mall, a park—and eavesdrop. Write down the most interesting thing you hear and create a scene around it.
2. Watch an old movie or TV show you loved as a child (for me, it’s The Partridge Family). Let yourself really feel what you loved about it when you were a kid. Then do a freewrite from that place of childlike joy. (Write about the movie/show or whatever else comes up.)
3. Eat something you’ve never eaten before. Eat it slowly, and experience the texture, taste, feel and smell of it. Compile a list of adjectives, verbs and nouns that describe the experience. Make the list as long as you can. Then use the words to write a love scene.



4. Go to an outdoor place you love—a pond, a beach, a woody path, a park—and write there.
5. Do a freewrite. Make yourself keep writing for at least 10 minutes. Start with “I remember when…” Or, for something different: “I don’t remember when…” Better yet, do both.
6. Go for a walk and pretend you’re from another planet. Notice everything—sights, smells, sounds—as if you’re experiencing it for the first time. Then write about something you encountered on your walk.
7. Make a collage from pictures you clip from magazines. A day later, look at what you’ve created and write about the theme you see in the pictures or a story they tell.
8. Take an hour for yourself and do whatever you feel like doing. Spend the last 10 minutes of the hour writing about whatever comes up.
9. Find something you wrote in the past—a journal entry, a note, a list, a homework assignment, an e-mail—and write about the person who wrote it as if he/she was a character rather than an earlier version of you.
10. (Variation on Number 3): Eat something you loved as a child but never eat now. (For me, it’s a Pop-tart.) Eat it slowly, and experience the texture, taste, feel and smell of it. Compile a list of adjectives, verbs and nouns that describe the experience. Make the list as long as you can. Then use the words to write about someone from your past.

Let Go of Control to Steer a True Creative Course

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. —André Gide

When I turned the page of the small calendar by my desk to December, I was greeted with this quote. It feels so true to me, of all types of creativity and also of life in general.

Today, I’m going to let Gide’s words and this photo speak for themselves. I hope you find them as inspirational as I do.

Why I Don’t Speak Cello

On Tuesday morning, a cello sat on the sidewalk outside my house. I considered engaging in a musical conversation, but instead rushed off to work.

On Wednesday morning, the sidewalk looked up at me with empty eyes.

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I have a confession to make. Lately, I haven’t been practicing what I preach on this blog. Circumstances in my life at the moment have had me working long hours six or seven days a week, every week, for a while. Life has been particularly stressful. And I haven’t been maintaining a creative practice.

This blog itself does give me a bit of an outlet. But I haven’t devoted any time at all to what I call my soul-writing. The fragments of fiction and poetry, the phrases of metaphor and memory my Muse hands to me. Moments of creativity that may become pieces of a larger project or may just feed my deepest self by merely existing.

But this past weekend, I didn’t work at all, taking two days in a row off for the first time in quite a while. And guess what happened? My Muse took the opportunity to begin nudging me. Or maybe he’s been nudging me all along, and I just haven’t been listening. At any rate, a couple of metaphorical micro-stories flowed into my mind. And once I started writing them down, more arrived.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they all speak to issues of creativity and writing. I’ve shared one above, and I plan to continue sharing them and write about the issue each describes. ”Why I Don’t Speak Cello” illustrates my current period of overworked stress. Something extraordinary sits on the periphery of my life, and I’ve been refusing to engage with it. Creativity is always extraordinary, you know.

My life hasn’t slowed down, in spite of the fact that I actually had a real weekend. And my stress level remains high. But this little story my Muse handed me reminds me that I can still take 15 minutes to talk to the cello before I rush to work.

15 minutes a day. That’s how you learn to speak cello—or become a writer, or maintain a creative practice—no matter how much crazy life throws at you.

And if you do ignore the cello until it disappears, just remember to stop and talk to the timpani and the trombone when they arrive.

Creative Protest by the Invisible Artist

I just discovered Liu Bolin’s series of photos in which he camouflages himself to blend into a variety of backgrounds. These striking images tantalize the mind while making a statement about the artist’s invisibility in Chinese society. Liu began this project after authorities shut down his Beijing studio in 2005. I’m sharing these photos here both because they illustrate a beautifully creative political protest and because they engage my Muse with their mind-bending brilliance.

I had to look pretty hard to find Liu in the last picture!

You can see more of Liu’s photos at Damn Cool Pics. And check out this Daily Mail article for more information about Liu and his project.

100 Ways to Fire Up Your Muse

I just discovered writer/illustrator/guerrilla artist Keri Smith’s list of 100 Ideas to spark your creativity. These prompts include writing, drawing and other types of inspirational stimulants.

Find the list here, then print it and cut along the dotted lines, creating 100 squares of inspiration. Use them in any way that works for you. Pick a random square every day/week and follow its instructions. Or choose one that appeals to you and do it every day for a week. Journal about your creative experiments. Or join a friend/a group and do them together. However you use these, make sure you’re having fun!

Friday Fun

For those of you wanting a little creative break today, here’s a roundup of amusing and inspiring sites I’ve mentioned before. Some people call these time-wasters, but since they all stimulate creativity, I consider them time very well spent!

Sketch Swap: Draw something with your cursor and submit it, then receive a picture someone else created.

This is Sand: Click on the tiny gray box at the top left of the screen for instructions. You can use your cursor to drop digital sand of different colors and create beautiful virtual designs.

Magnetic Poetry: An electronic version of the refrigerator magnets that turn us all into poets.

Language is a Virus: A variety of inspirational devices including writing prompts, a character name generator, a poetry generator, the text collage, madlib poems, the haiku-a-tron and much more.

Passtime: Three “creative time wasters,” including instructions on writing a haiku using the phone book.

Addictionary: Amusing new words you can peruse, or make up your own.

Good Things Should Never End: Take a trip that’s interactive, creative and surreal.

Research Proves It! Love Inspires Creativity.

It may seem obvious that feelings of love go hand-in-hand with heightened creativity. Artists of every type have created masterpieces motivated by love: paintings, plays, songs, sculpture. I’ve certainly written my share of love-inspired essays, fictional scenes and other pieces. Starting with some very bad poetry at the age of 15 when the boy I was smitten with moved on.

But when psychologists decided to study this connection, they found both that love inspires creativity and that lust inspires analytical thinking. Two different studies prompted students to think of either romantic or sexual situations. Afterwards, the subjects who’d been thinking of sex performed better on logic problems, while the students reflecting on love were best at solving problems requiring creativity.

The researchers concluded that love causes people to think about long-term goals, which involves taking an imaginative leap. This enhances holistic thinking and creativity. Lust, on the other hand, inspires dedication to more short term pursuits, thereby heightening analytical ability.

I can’t sum up this blog post any better than this Miller-McCune article about the research did: “This explains the relative paucity of Odes to a One-Night Stand.”

Except to say if you’re feeling creatively blocked, why not kiss someone you love? Or, as researchers had subjects do in one of the studies, imagine taking a long walk with your beloved. It just might set your muse on fire.

10 Ways to Woo Your Muse

1. Do something you haven’t done since you were a child. Slide down a slide.  Eat a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Play in a sprinkler. Sing a song you liked when you were a kid.
2. Keep a notebook next to your bed, and write about whatever wakes you up.
3. Take a little time to stop “doing” and just “be” for a while.  Meditate. Walk. Stare at the wall. Soak in a bubble bath.



4. Spend some time doing anything you consider fun, even if it seems frivolous. Especially if it seems frivolous.
5. Go for a walk and look at everything in your path as if you’re seeing it for the first time.
6. Do something creative. Color. Dance. Play with Play-Doh.
7. Pay attention to your dreams—both the night kind and the day kind.
8. Rip up your To Do list for the day or for the afternoon and do whatever you feel like doing.
9. Go outside at night and count the stars. Or waltz in the rain. Or share your secrets with the moon.
10. Do something silly. Talk in a funny voice. Walk down the street backwards.  See if you can balance a spoon on your nose.

Play in the New Strangling My Muse Sandbox

Check out the new interactive feature of this blog: The Readers’ Sandbox.

I’m thrilled at all the wonderful comments readers leave here, fulfilling my goal of a two-way conversation about creativity.  Now I’m offering this new space for even more interactivity.

Click on the “Readers’ Sandbox” tab at the top of this blog to share your bursts of creativity or read what others have written. I’ve set up different areas for various types of writing. Have fun, go wild!

Turn Your Life into a Movie…or a Book…or a Fortune Cookie…

Sometimes, I need to jolt myself out of creative lethargy. It’s good to shake up your writing style now and then, and it tends to send a beacon to your muse. Muses love it when you try something new.

A while back, I started journaling in the format of the film synopses I write as one of my paying gigs. These brief daily entries combined true events from my life with movie language in a hybrid form I found surprisingly fun to craft.
A few samples:

September 21:
While looking out her window during a break, freelance writer Sandy Ackers notices that every single dog who passes pees on the same corner of the building across the street. Launching a personal investigation to discover the cause of this phenomenon, she soon realizes the canines may be engaged in a mysterious form of communication. Meanwhile, her work remains untouched as she strives to unravel the deepening mystery.

September 24:
A weary writer drags herself out of bed Monday morning, her body wracked with pain from yesterday’s 20 hours at the computer. Why, she asks herself, didn’t she work harder last week? With a deadline on Wednesday, she faces two more dreary days of eking words out of her bleary brain, which has become stuck in second gear. She soon spirals down into an existential nightmare, with random words flying around her head like a swarm of angry hornets.

October 1:
In this tense drama, passionate freelancer Sandy keeps vigil at her living room window, waiting for the one man she desires. As if to torment her, he visits every home across the street, ignoring her completely.Sandy knows from experience that hours may pass before the mailman returns, hopefully bearing the highly anticipated check that will mean the difference between dinner out tonight and another celebration of warmed-up leftovers.

October 10:
Sandy Ackers loves working at home—until the wacky lady across the street starts playing her accordion. 83-year-old German Anneliese enjoys sitting at her open window and regaling passers-by with her tunes. The only problem? She’s terrible! As Sandy flinches through every missed note during her 99th hearing of “Edelweiss,” she imagines a host of hilarious schemes to wrest the accordion from Anneliese’s grip and restore peace to the neighborhood.

October 14:
Stretching on a Sunday morning, Sandy expects to enjoy a lazy day with her husband. What she doesn’t yet realize is that a malicious fog has been gathering in the night, surrounding her and slowing down her brain. When she fully wakes, she’ll notice the viral cloud hovering around her — and she’ll have to fight hard to avoid becoming its latest victim. This disturbing spine-chiller co-stars Headache, Sluggish Muscles and Creeping Pain.

Exercises like this can make writing fun when it starts feeling routine, or help nudge you out of a block. I find that keeping myself amused also facilitates my creative flow.

But this concept can go far beyond movie synopsis journal entries. How about writing your autobiography in the form of book jacket copy? Or discussing your protagonist’s current dilemma through game instructions? You could explore your world or create a fictional one using bubblegum cards, a tarot deck, highway billboards, fortune cookies, horoscopes…the possibilities are endless.

As always, I’d love to hear about or see any creative efforts from people reading this.