The Curious Creative: Week 39

Renaming Familiar Tales

This is the thirty-ninth installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

Writing prompts are aplenty in how-to-unleash-your-creativity books, and with the Internet, it is so easy to quickly snag a prompt. But there is still something difficult about reading a prompt and then staring at a blank page.  That is why my site aims to engage in creative play, doing something a little out-of-the-box or multi-modal, in order to bypass any intimidation that might come from staring at an empty piece of paper.

This week’s exercise has you design the writing prompt yourself by visiting old familiar tales, and it adds a physical element – taking books off a shelf, slapping sticky notes on them, opening to first pages- in hopes that, by engaging yourself in these different ways, the writing will come more easily.

Your Turn!

1. Go to your bookshelf and pull out 3-4 books you’ve read. 

2. On sticky notes, write a new title for each book related to its theme (ie, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Entrenched Racism; O Pioneers! – Unforgiving Land; The Joy Luck Club – Mothers Revising their Lives through their Daughters). Slap these sticky notes onto each book. 

3. Choose one of these invented titles and stick it at the top of a piece of paper. 

4. As quickly as you can, think of personal connections – a situations or events from your life- and list them on the paper. 

5. Open the book from which the title came. Copy down the first three words of the first sentence. Begin telling your story from here.

How did you do? Did you feel released from over-thinking when slapping new titles onto old books? Were you able to list 2-3 personal connections to the titles? Did having the first three words written already give you a good jumping off point for your story?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing! 

The Curious Creative: Week 38

Ekphrasis Formula

This is the thirty-eighth installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

An ekphrasis is a visual description about a work of art. One of my favorite examples is William Carlos Williams’ poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” written about the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting of the same name.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

by Pieter Bruegel, 1525-1530 

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

by William Carlos Williams, 1883 – 1963

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring 

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry 

of the year was
awake tingling
with itself 

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax 

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was 

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

In this ekphrasis, William Carlos Williams employs a very simple technique: he literally describes what is happening in the painting in a journalistic manner (when, what, where). But what makes this poem powerful is his use of two simple words: “unsignificantly” and “unnoticed.” This adverb and adjective, with their emotive connotations, give the reader a feeling of pity for Icarus, who has failed at a lifetime achievement, so easily forgotten and unimportant to the everyman.

Ekphrasis offer a nice way into writing poetry, both through the accessible inspiration of visual art and the simple journalistic formula. In this week’s exercise, you will choose from several famous paintings and employ William Carlos Williams’ template for success!

Your Turn!

1. Choose one of the following paintings:

The Lady of Shallot

by William Holman Hunt, 1896

 Ballet Dancers in the Wings

by Edgar Degas, 1834-1917

American Gothic

by Grant Wood, 1930

2. Begin your poem, “According to (artist’s name), when…”
3. Next in your poem, describe the following literally:

a.     the occasion (what is happening in the painting)

b.     the season or time of year

c.      the atmosphere (look at the background for clues)

d.     describe the subject of the painting with 1-2 adverb and/or adjectives

How did you do? Did you notice new details from spending time looking closely at the artwork? Did having a formula allow you to connect with the artwork on an emotional level? Were you able to express some kind of (new) emotion about the artwork through your poem?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing! 

The Curious Creative: Week 37

To Write Without Thinking: Exploring Body Language

This is the thirty-seventh installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

For writers, sometimes we need to find our words in non-linguistic ways. Sounds strange, right? Admittedly, when I am most in the flow while writing, I am often not thinking. I leave that place of words, that linguistic center of my brain, and enter a different space. Similarly, while dancing tango, when I am at my best, which means most connected to my partner and the music, I am not thinking. If words do enter my mind, I immediately fall out of this connection and often make a mistake. As a result, while dancing, I work hardest to not think. The challenge is that unlike dance, where movement and breath are the building blocks, with writing, words are the building blocks, so how can we not think with words while creating words?

I recently took a creative writing class called “Body Language” (see source below), in which we used the language of movement to inform our creative writing and vice versa. I was most interested in transferring the zen space I enter in tango to my creative writing practice. I was able to achieve this for a few moments through an exercise the teachers had us do. We were to watch a qi gong movement, and without knowing its name in Chinese, ascribe it a name. Both performing the motions myself, and watching our teacher and classmates do so, put me in that zen state in which I could muster up a name without thinking too cerebrally. I used as little language-based thought as possible to conjure up a title, operating from a place of “blink decision making” or intuition.

For this week’s Curious Creative exercise, you will experience the exercise for yourself to hopefully put you in that same non-thinking mode of creativity. My hope is that with this mere 10 minutes of creative play, you will form muscle memory to help engage you in this non-thinking mode while writing in the future.

Your Turn!

1. Watch this youtube video.  You will see a man do two different qi gong movements. The subtitles are in German, so unless you know German, you will not be affected by learning the titles of the movements. The first one starts at 0:50. The second one starts at 2:36. He repeats both a couple of times. 

2. Without thinking too much, write a title for each of the movements. Just to give you an idea, some qi gong exercise names are “Immortal Looks to the Heavens,” “Dragon Holds Pearl,” and “Bamboo Bends in the Wind.” You don’t need to think of similar names; just know that you can create metaphorical ones, not just literal descriptions of the movements. 

How did you do? Did a title pop into your mind immediately, without apparent word-thought? Were you able skip any belaboring over word choice? Did you feel a kind of pressure-free relaxation as you watched the movement?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing! 

Source: inspired by the workshop, “Body Language: Exploring Your Secondary Intelligence,” taught at The Hugo House by Jill Leininger and Ilvs Strass on 8/13/17.