Creativity Steps Overview
.Last week I posted about some steps for getting into a creative frame of mind, and decided to try them out on my posts for the week. Overall I think that using the steps was rather effective.
The posts were (I’m back up properly these will link to the posts… for now, all the posts in question are on the same page as this one Back up now, with linkification):
* Typing
* The Ruler Con
* ‘A Tree on the Path’
* Escape Velocity
* Winter Holidays
* ‘A Short Reprieve’
* Embarrassment Comedy
For each post, I tried to have no preconceptions regarding what it was going to be about. I also didn’t use any of the lists of ideas for posts that I have—I just sat down cold, followed the steps, and went with whatever came up.
Some of them were unremarkable, in that they’re things that I’d thought about in the past that came up when I went through the steps. Typing and Embarrassment Comedy were like that, but as they weren’t on my list of things to write about, I’m glad the steps brought them out.
Winter Holidays was clearly influenced by being written on Christmas day, but it also benefitted considerably from the steps.
Escape Velocity and The Ruler Con were not things I had planned to write about, although The Ruler Con is obviously linked to a lot of issues I’m very interested in. Both were interesting things to explore for me, but suffered from having a thirty-minute limit on them. That’s my limit for posts this month, and while I stretch it a little, I couldn’t spend as much time as I would have liked on either of these.
The same goes for ‘A Short Reprieve’, which feels to me like the start of something rather than a finished whole.
Those aren’t complaints about the process, though. I still essentially got ideas from nowhere, which sounds close to the definition of ‘inspiration’. And I also got ‘A Tree on the Path’, which is by far my favorite post from the week, from doing it. Everything in that story is new, I hadn’t had any of the ideas before, I didn’t know where it was going to go even when I was about halfway through it, and I’m really happy with it.
I don’t think I’m going to keep using those steps every day, at least not in the short term, but I will definitely return to doing so at some point, and I will also use them for my other writing, because they clearly helped a lot. If you’re interested in trying to get inspiration yourself, I recommend them. You might want to change the Yeats to something else, or of course make all kinds of other alterations, but trying them is likely to be worth it.
02 Jan 2007 at 09:20
The same goes for ‘A Short Reprieve’, which feels to me like the start of something rather than a finished whole.
Indeed. It’s piqued my curiosity and I want to read the rest of the story.
03 Jan 2007 at 17:13
Heh, I want to know what happens next too!