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exercise: tapping your creativity
Thought I’d share with you all one of the WWP exercises, as a preview of what we do here. Feel free to try it. Thank you Rachel, for uploading the phone pic of what I drew on the board.
Here's the drawing I made on the board to go along with the exercise. Thank you Rachel Short, for the phone pic!
Association – think of the free association word game in psychology – one word leads to another. In my copy of The Princeton Guide to Poetry and Poetics, under ASSOCIATION you find, “see imagination,” and the description: “connoting free play, mental creativity, and license” (566). Whatever the definition – we writers need it. We need our intellects to take a vacation and let our imaginations run free for one thing to lead to another so we can make creative, intuitive leaps. Leaps that go beyond intellect. Here are some exercises to do that.
Associative Poetry: Listen to “In the Library” by Charles Simic. (You can read it here) Note the imaginative leaps that characterize this poem. By allowing his imagination to run free, Simic was able to make an original and formidable creation.
Directions: Write a short poem which starts out with an ordinary situation and then becomes extraordinary and unexpected.
Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) – by Crockett Johnson proves that in the 1950s, known as the conformist, red-scare Eisenhower era, at least someone wanted to promote creativity in children. What a marvelous episodic adventure! A picaresque novel like Don Quixote or Huckleberry Finn, but without the satire.
Directions: This exercise uses a different channel – visual.
- Listen to Harold and the Purple Crayon – notice how one thing leads to another.
- Take a crayon and a piece of paper
- Create a series of simple connected drawings where the next image is inspired by the former. The last image should work its way back to the first.
- Write a short narrative poem telling a story to explain the images.
Words, Words, Words
Directions:
- List three interesting words with interesting word histories from a dictionary.
- Write a scene in which three things happen that are inspired by the histories of these words. You don’t have to actually use the word or the history – it’s inspiration, not imitation.
In sum: By allowing yourself permission to create events that flow associatively, outside of a logical progression, you’ve tapped your creativity, bypassed the intellectual critic, and opened the doorway to your creativity. You set the stage for allowing your writing to surprise you. When you’re surprised, you delight in the act of creation, and when you’re surprised by your creation, the reader will also be surprised and experience delight in reading it.
