How to Get the Creative Flow Flowing Again
Attacking years of accumulation of dust and rust from my poor clockwork brain, for the past month I’ve been seeking out long abandoned nooks and crannies, trying to engage my creative side again. I’ve cleaned off a few gears, but much more oil and elbow grease must be applied before fiction writing will flow for me, instead of spitting and sputtering out in painful jerking starts and stops.
Searching Out the Path to Creative Writing
Laure's Moleskine
I won a contest online this week. Soon, I will be receiving the absolutely gorgeous, customized Moleskine journal shown here, from Laure at La Baleine à Plumes.
My Husband's Project.
Miss Laure is the second inspirational artist that I have had the pleasure to communicate with this week; serendipitous, I think. At an event in Nashville this past weekend, my husband and I stumbled into a creativity workshop, “Unlocking Your Inner Muse.” with Kayti Protos. My husband is a bit of an artist himself, as you can see from his project, but he doesn’t project as one. I’m thinking his job in IT blunts the flow in his every day conversations, just as my 20 years of focus on documenting computer, targetry, and radar systems blunts mine.
My Project.
No, I’ve never been an artist, and the immaturity of my project doesn’t bother me. The exercise was great fun. The lesson was powerful. Everyone is a creative being. How each person expresses that creativity best varies from person to person, but we all have a gift to communicate from the heart that we can turn to.
My best outlet is still writing, but I stifled my creativity in pursuit of an incorrect definition of “responsibility” long enough to let the story telling gears of imagination rust and bind. Have your creative writing juices dried up? They make more. Search it out using the simple path suggested below. I look forward to making the journey with you.
Read!
The more you read, the more writing ammo you acquire. Reading and examining the works of others, both good and bad, illuminates the craft like no other activity. My pleasure reading and writing time was minimal at best for several years, and it shows. Timing, characterization, plot lines, and word usage; what works and what doesn’t: it’s all in there. I’ve just started reading fiction again and I can already feel small bubbles of inspiration forming. I still need to ramp up some more, though.
Stephen King recommends 2 to 4 hours a day in On Writing. It will be torture to spend so much time enjoying myself on a daily basis, but I’m ready to make the sacrifice, how about you?
Write!
I write four to six articles a week to a couple of blogs and submit short blurbs to several social media venues daily. I’ve been writing in these mediums, at this pace, for a month now and, while I’m having more fun than I have in a long time, I’ve not made much progress in creative writing. Since my ultimate goal is to return to writing stories, the kind of stories I wrote freely as a child – with more maturity from my years of experience, of course – I need to push a bit further.
How much are you writing? What works for you, what doesn’t, and what do you feel you need to do more of? Me, I’m going to take a cue from my new artist friends and try to incorporate writing activities that tap into my raw imagination on a daily basis.
Free Flow!
With or without writing prompts, taking time out to channel writing in a flow of consciousness tunnels down to our creative core. Tell a story every day. Pretend you’re Skeeter Bronson from the movie Bedtime Stories and create from your day’s experiences, or take a news story, or word from the dictionary, and weave fiction from the prompt.
I’m going to dedicate the half hour following my daily walk to this activity. Do you perform creative writing exercises regularly? When do you think is the best time for creative exercises? Do you prefer prompts or totally blank paper/screen? If I posted daily prompts when I do my exercises for general participation, would you join me?
Read, write, and exercise those storytelling muscles. Tap into the core of what all my artistic friends remind me is a well of inspiration, and remind yourself that you are a creative being.
Please take the time to answer some of the questions I posed throughout this article. I’d love it if you shared your responses by leaving a comment, but at least answer them to yourself and take action based on your conclusions. After all, just thinking about improving your writing won’t get you there :)
