Failure and Creativity

A fascinating infographic looking at the creative process.

8 Cool Ways to Stoke Your Creative Juices

A great post over at nofilm school explores some traditional and less orthodox approaches to stir up your innate creative juices and get out great storytelling elements.

Check out this article 8 Somewhat Unusual Screenwriting Tips That May Help Kickstart and Maintain Your Creativity

• Freewrite
• Get a journal and make it your own
• Take your characters to lunch
• Talk to yourself
• Do bizarre things that make you embarrassed of yourself
• Become a voyeur
• Be your characters
• Take time to just marinate

Funeral Talk

At a funeral recently and overheard an older woman talking before the funeral began.

"Say something nice about me at my funeral?" the woman said, "my kids don't have anything nice to say about now when I'm alive!"

As preparations continued, she explained to her friend about her philosophy on life. "When we're born, we're given a death sentence. Simple as that. There's no avoiding it. Death is waiting for us at one point or another."

People started to move, so the funeral was about to start. "But I tell you," she continued, "no matter how a person behaved in life, no matter what they did, I've never been to a funeral where they couldn't find something nice to say about them. Not just nice. Glowing! They can go on and on about what a golden person they were. So I don't know what to make of that, if it matters or not what you did in life."

Perhaps I am particularly partial to comments at funerals because I am currently listening to Neil Gaiman read The Graveyard Book.

More writing prompts

Some more good places to exercise the writing muscles

• Language is a Virus
• One Word
• Writing Prompts on Twitter

Inspiration at 70

I was listening to the latest Moth podcast. It was a story presented by Cynthia Riggs called The Case of the Curious Codes. The story was edge of your seat enthralling and intriguing, with a romance woven in. I was inspired by her opening remarks, seeing at any age a person continues to reach out for their dreams.

My mother died at 99. After her death, I was kind of at loose ends and Bed and Breakfast guests suggested that I go back to school and get a degree in creative writing. So I filled out an application form. And they accepted me. And somebody told me that I ought to write murder mysteries. And two years later, my first murder mystery was published by St. Martin's Press. I've now had 10 published and I have the eleventh on Kindle and I'm working on the twelfth right now. Well now, my first book was published when I was 70.  

Writing Insights from Josh Fialkov

On the recent Nerdist Writers Panel, Josh Fialkov shared some of his writing habits.

I essentially taught myself to write in the 3 hours of her napping. I've learned to kind of compartmentalize. I will run the story in my head non-stop, I am constantly chewing over the next thing I have to write. Then by the time I am actually in front of my computer. It's typing. It's just process at that point. 

I particularly liked how he carved out this time and focused his writing energies.

More of his work can be found on Amazon.

Meditative Writing

Something to try to help connect to the energy of the writer. There was a time when creativity was easy-when we were young, driven by an endless desire to create, and no fear, no judgment, and no internal censor whatsoever.

Meditative writing aims to return you to that time, when finding your voice as a writer was as easy as being yourself, and raw creativity flowed as effortlessly as inspiration.