Just a quick post.
Here’s a random simile generator! Just press a button and try to justify what it says.
Joy is like a swimming pool?
Jealousy is like a calculator?
Frustration is like a parking lot?
Well, that last one is kind of easy, but still…
In college I had a professor who told us one of his favorite ways to get past writer’s block was to translate a poem into English from a language you don’t know. In fact, to do this correctly, you should choose a language you know nothing about. Most people recognize too many Spanish and French words for this to work well.
Instead of looking for the meanings of the words, treat the poem like an object. Look to the shape of the poem and the length of the lines. If you can sound out words, use the sound to help you. If it character writing, look to the shapes and guess the meaning. Look for patterns in the writing and repetition.
Treat it as a real translation. The first time through you should get a rough approximation of the poem. Then, once you have a feel for your “translation,” smooth the language and amplify the meaning. Choose appropriate vocabulary. Read it to yourself.
Once you’re done, you’ll have a completely original work. The professor said that he had several published poems that were actually “translations” from great poets. Don’t read any actual translations until you’re completely finished, but do read a translation just in case you are too close.
Today, exercise your power of creativity to influence the world. Make the world amazing for someone. It doesn’t matter if you know them or not or if you see the outcome of what you do. Give them a story they can tell their friends that has no easy answer.
Hide a $20 bill in a library book about working your way out of debt. Set up a diorama of tiny plastic animals outside a stranger’s front door. Call a random number from the phone book and tell whoever answers that they are fantastic and that everything is going to turn out alright. Put a copy of Mad Magazine inside a Wall Street Journal. Make a poster that looks like a lost pet poster that says, “This Cat Is Safe At Home – If You See Him, Get Out Of My House – $50 Reward.” Invent a new catch phrase and spend all day trying to get other people to say it. Ask them to page Tom Hanks at the supermarket and when they ask you if it’s “the Tom Hanks” tell them it is.
Do anything you can think of that will make someone pause for a moment and consider how strange and wonderful the world can be.
Need a topic to write about or random thoughts to get your brain working? Why not ride the wave of the fickle attention of the American public? Here are couple of ways to get access to what people are thinking about and talking about right now!
Google hot trends gives a constantly updated list of what people are searching for on Google. For instance, today people are searching for “On Golden Pond”, “Juanita Bynum” and “High School Musical 2 dance along.” Just combining those three things could provide you with a wonderful plot to a short story. Or a show on the Disney Channel about growing old and spousal abuse.
You could also check out what people are dreaming about. Dreamjournal has a number of interesting ways to view the symbols and plots of a large sample of dreamers. Here is a bunch of charts to show you what dreams are popular right now.
In any case, if you aren’t getting anywhere with what’s in your own head, try using what’s going on in everyone else’s.
William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, famously used mechanical means to spark his creativity. He and Bryon Gysin were the first to use the “cut up” method in literature. They had various methods for cutting up pages of text and rearranging them to create something new. They by taking the text apart and reassembling it randomly, you could reveal the real meaning behind it and create associations you would have never come up with. Languageisavirus has a tremendous number of these methods automated and available for you to experiment with.
Burroughs and Gysin also experimented with a flickering Dreamachine that sparked hallucinations in some and seizures in other. It has worked for me, try to see if you find it useful. Don’t use it if you are prone to photosensitive epilepsy.
In MInd Writing Slogans, Allen Ginsberg selected and arranged a series of quotes and presented them as a guide to perception and creation. They are posted all over the internet, so I won’t re-post all of them, but the first series on primary perception (22 out of 84) really struck a chord with me today. The two that keep pinging around in my head are “notice what you notice” and “if we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.”
- “First Thought, Best Thought” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
- “Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
- “The Mind must be loose.” — John Adams
- “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” — Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”
- “My writing is a picture of the mind moving.” — Philip Whalen
- Surprise Mind — Allen Ginsberg
- “The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!” — Basho
- “Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
- “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” –– Walt Whitman
- “…What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? … Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” — John Keats
- “Form is never more than an extension ofcontent. — Robert Creeley to Charles Olson
- “Form follows function.” — Frank Lloyd Wright*
- Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
- “Nothing is better for being Eternal
- Nor so white as the white that dies of a day.” — Louis Zukofsky
- Notice what you notice. — A. G.
- Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
- Observe what’s vivid. — A. G.
- Vividness is self-selecting. — A. G.
- “Spots of Time” — William Wordsworth
- If we don’t show anyone we’re free to write anything. –– A. G.
- “My mind is open to itself.” — Gelek Rinpoche
- “Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound.” — Charles Reznikoff
Everyone worries about how to get rid of writer’s block once they have it, but why not prevent it before it starts? This is a list of proven block stoppers.
1. Sleep: There’s actually science to support this one. Eight hours of sleep helps you reboot your brain, think more clearly and be more creative. Lack of sleep makes it difficult to make connections. Even the easy stuff becomes difficult.
2. Eat: Eat healthy foods. Eat a variety of foods. Watch how much alcohol and caffeine you drink. This will keep you well. It’s hard to be creative if you get every cold and flu that comes your way.
3. Exercise: Now, I’m not saying that you need to join a gym or get to Terry Crews size to prevent writer’s block. I am saying that you need to move every day and get your heart pumping. Take a walk, play some basketball or toss a tennis ball for your dog.
4. Read: If you want to write, you should read constantly. There are few pleasures as great for a writer as finding a great book to read. Don’t just read a great book, reread it and absorb its secrets. Then use them.
5. Keep Learning: Take a class, go to a museum, read a trade magazine for an industry you know nothing about or watch a weird documentary. Just keep learning, the world is huge. The minute it starts to feel like there’s nothing left to discover, it will also feel like there’s nothing much to write about.
6. Write Every Day: Even if it’s only for 15 minutes, write every day. Develop a pattern, a constant rhythm, that can’t be broken. If you write every day, it will become as effortless and necessary as breathing. Better to write for a short period every day than for marathon sessions when a deadline is looming.
7. Listen to People Talk: Don’t just lecture or tell stories, really listen to what other people have to say. These are your characters, your inspirations and you should steal all you can. Practicing unjudgemental listening opens the door to hearing everything going on in someone else’s head. Ask lots of questions and listen to the answers. Using details from other people’s lives is a lot easier than making something up from scratch.
8. Lower your Standards: Poet William Stafford said, “I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance … One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.”
9. Get Rid of the Doubters in your Life: Have someone in your life that doesn’t think you’re really a writer and that you’re wasting your time? Either learn to ignore them or get rid of them. Dump them. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known them. You already have enough doubt inside your head without having to put up with some jerk adding more doubt outside your head.
10. WRITE!
Patton Oswalt, who voices the title character in Ratatouille, is a very funny, honest stand up comedian. He writes an incredibly entertaining blog on his website. One fairly recent post listed his three personal affirmations. I wanted to share this one which involves focus and the creative process.
He starts the story as a poor, young comedian, sharing a comedy condo with a headliner. A comedy condo is basically the free housing you get to use while you play the club. The headliner got the bigger room with a water bed and huge TV. Patton got the small, bare room with a bed, a chair and a clock radio. Bored in his room, Patton went out for some food, when he got back the headliner was waiting for him and had been all afternoon.
“I went into your room,” he said.
I said, “Oh.”
“The clock radio in my bedroom only has one alarm. Yours has two alarms and a snooze option. So I swapped them out. I wanted to make sure you knew what I did, so I’ve been waiting here.”
I said, “Oh.”
“I mean, you realize, me being the headliner, you having two alarms and a snooze option, as the emcee, is unfair.” Now that I write this, I remember now that he stressed the word “unfair”.
“Yyyyyeah,” I said, but my heart was filling with joy.
This was the first time in my life — and in my still-neophyte stand-up career — when I realized that certain douchebags I was encountering wouldn’t be in my life four or five years later. A headliner who could waste an afternoon over an extra alarm and a snooze option on an $8 clock radio wasn’t going to be pursuing the same career that I would. He’d fight for petty privileges, live and die by the approval of the dumbest person in the audience, and think getting on the 5 O’Clock Funnies entitled him to a sitcom.
The affirmation: Leave them to their fates.
There are two other affirmations in the post. I recommend it.
Well, this article from Lifehacker has one of Jerry Seinfeld’s secrets. And I quote…
He (Seinfeld) told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."
"Don’t break the chain." He said again for emphasis.
Of course, the other secret of his success was to stick to his vision. He has a clear "no hugging, no learning" rule for his sitcom. Part of the reason that Seinfeld is such a great series is that the characters don’t grow or learn. They just are what they are. Such clear statements of purpose.
Don’t break the chain!
Here’s a great resource if you are writing or drawing anything from the beginning of photography through the 1940s. Shorpy’s is donated copyright free images from the dawn of photography. Not only is an amazingly inspirational thing to add to your RSS feed, but there is also lively discussion of the images. If you have some to add to the pool, they’re always looking for new stuff.
You can even check out the history of cat photography! It existed long before the internet.
Also, I’ve blogged this site before, but their content, scans of copyright free beautiful books, is amazing – Bibliodyssey. They just posted a group of pre-printed envelopes from the Civil War that are worth a look.
Creative Creativity 