Time to Write

Visualization: supercharge your creativity with music

Creativity music bonus

Will you forgive me for telling you about this new site?

If you’re already suffering from info overload, you may not thank me for telling you about this site, but actually you can use it to check quickly the key news and feature stories that interest you.

 I’m talking about “Flip Fast” a new service from Google. It gives you thumbnail images of a variety of news sources, each one highlighting one of the top stories or features of the day.

 You’ll find it here: fastflip.googlelabs.com/

 The thing I like is that most of the links are to substantial articles, not just quickie summaries. But web surfers beware: you check this out at your risk—you may find an hour or two disappear!

(information is great, but how do you turn it into exciting books, plays, screenplays? For help in going from idea all the way through to publication, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

Designing the future

It's another "feed your head" post today, a video of David Kelley of IDEO giving a 17-minute talk with fascinating video examples of some of the coolest stuff his company has been working on. His theme is that design is becoming more people-oriented. You'll see some innovative ideas for Prada, the ultimate cubicle that even Dilbert would love, a new device called Spyfish (I want one, and I don't even have a boat), and hear about how innovation is transforming lives in Kenya. (If you don't see the video below, the link is http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/122. ) Aside from just marveling at these things, it might prompt you to think about how you could re-design parts of your environment to support your creativity better.

Activity between your ears (Ken Nordine and word jazz)

In the previous post, I mentioned Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz. I was happy to find that he’s still around (he’s 89 on April 13, 2009) and there’s a site on which you can listen to some excerpts of his work via a podcast (it’s at www.wordjazz.com). Some of the files seem to be missing and I don’t think the site is active, but here’s one to listen to now if you want to create some jazzy activity between your ears:

www.tuxjunction.net/media/mybaby.mp3

Art to listen to

Audio collage is an art form you don’t hear about much these days, other than in the context of sampling and re-mixes. It was something I was exposed to when I was a kid (anybody else remember Ken Nordine’s “Word Jazz?”) One artist who works in it these days is Jon Nelson, using the name “Escape Mechanism.”

You can read an interview with him here (from the Twin Cities Decider—you’ll also be able to listen to two of his musical tracks there. He also has a podcast that you can get via the iTunes store (for free)—it’s called Some Assembly Required and it features the work of other artists as well. It’s pretty weird, but if you want to get your ears around something different, go have a listen.

A Writing Prompt to Help Spark Your Creativity

Once in a while, our creativity needs a little push to get the flow of ideas starting again. Here is one of my favorite quick-start tricks:

Open a novel and relate the first sentence to what you're writing or would like to write. Here's an example: the first novel I saw on my shelf is "The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon," by Tom Spanbauer (I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you whether it's good). Its opening line is, "If you're the devil, then it's not me telling this story."

The writing project I'm about to start is a surreal comedy screenplay about a group of people stuck on an island. The idea the opening line gives me is to make one of these people very religious since there is, at least for a time, an "end of days" feel to the situation. My protagonist is an intellectual who is either an atheist or agnostic, so this would make an interesting contrast. The conflict in beliefs could naturally lead to some conflicts in action.

One more example: Carl Hiaasen is one of my favorite contemporary authors and I just bought his novel, "Nature Girl." Here's the first sentence: "On the second day of January, windswept and bright, a half-blood Seminole named Sammy Tigertail dumped a dead body in the Lostmans River." (Hiaasen never wastes any time getting his stories started!)

For my island story, my first thought was, "What if a dead body washes up on the beach?" But since this is a comedy that seems a bit heavy. However, it makes me wonder what else could wash up that might provoke conflict or move the story forward, and that's something I'll keep in mind as I work more on the story.

As you can see, the prompt is just a way to activate your brain cells--where it takes you often ends up far away from the subject of the prompt.

How Bad Writing Can Be Good

The next time you're stuck watching a movie that isn't working, or are about to put down a book that isn't holding your attention, stop for a moment and seize the opportunity to turn this into something useful. Make it an exercise: if you were hired to rewrite this product, how could you make it better?

I learned the value of this exercise a long time ago when I was a script reader in Hollywood. The job was to read scripts that had been submitted to a production company and write a summary and a critique. We received some totally hopeless scripts and a few very good ones, but the ones from which I learned the most were the ones that were sort of OK but had at least one serious defect. By thinking about what could be done to make these scripts better, I began to become aware of the most common errors of storytelling and how they might be remedied.

To give you a recent example, the other day I saw the horror film, "1408," starring John Cusak, an actor who always brings some added intelligence to any film. I liked the movie, which is an old-fashioned (in a good way) shocker, missing the gore-porn that characterizes many horror films these days. But it does go out of control toward the end and the ending itself is weak, which is often a problem with movies about the supernatural. I haven't yet come up with a better idea, but I'm working on it...and if and when I do, I'm sure it'll be a useful tiny nugget that I will somehow apply in my own writing someday.

Give this a try--on top of everything else, it can turn a boring experience into something useful!

Get Out of the House Once in a While

On his Creativity and Innovation blog, Keith Sawyer points out one of the drawbacks of free-lancing, namely that you miss out on the inspirations that can come from spontaneous interaction with colleagues.

His suggestion: "Make a point of going out to lunch–and not always with the same group of co-workers, either. Attend networking events and trade group meet-and-greets. You’ll never be able to re-create the spontaneous water cooler conversation of the office, but you can still create opportunities for group genius to flourish." (By the way, Goup Genius is also the name of his book.)

An Innovative Format: Interactive Branded Sitcom

Ford Europe has pioneered what they call an interactive sitcom, "Where are the Joneses?" Produced by Steve Coogan's company, Babycow, it consists (so far--and it's near the end) of 95 videos lasting approximately 3 minutes each. They tell the story of a woman who finds out that her father was a sperm donor and she sets out to find her 27 siblings who are spread all over Europe. You will not be surprised to find that she drives a Ford, but the sponsorship is not at all intrusive.

Users are able to send in script ideas or scripts, and to apply to appear in the series. A press release referred to it as a "huge success" yet Youtube shows only about 700 views for the later episodes--presumably they are being watched on other sites in greater numbers, via links that don't affect the Youtube counter.

Anyway, I think they're very funny and an interesting new outlet that could easily be replicated with other sponsors. The first episode is here

September 20, 2007 in Feed Your Head | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Do you ever need a little push to come up with a fresh idea? One simple technique is to pick a word or image at random and try to relate it to your challenge. James Bickers has come up with what he calls The Majency Oracle, a 169 card deck of prompts that do the same thing. You can print them out on 3x5 index cards and he offers a full-color version and a "light" version that will save your printer's ink supply. Here are two examples of prompts:

"It only looks like an elevator. It doesn't move."

"Go back to the previous page. There's something you forgot to write down."

Obviously if you draw a blank you can go on to the next one. Rather than printing it out, I just keep it as a file and pick a number at random and go to that page.

You can download it free at www.jamesbickers.com/majency.html, but there's a donation button on his site if you'd like to say thanks.

Writing Prompts Card Deck

Do you ever need a little push to come up with a fresh idea? One simple technique is to pick a word or image at random and try to relate it to your challenge. James Bickers has come up with what he calls The Majency Oracle, a 169 card deck of prompts that do the same thing. You can print them out on 3x5 index cards and he offers a full-color version and a "light" version that will save your printer's ink supply. Here are two examples of prompts:

"It only looks like an elevator. It doesn't move."

"Go back to the previous page. There's something you forgot to write down."

Obviously if you draw a blank you can go on to the next one. Rather than printing it out, I just keep it as a file and pick a number at random and go to that page.

You can download it free at www.jamesbickers.com/majency.html, but there's a donation button on his site if you'd like to say thanks.