fallen verses

This is me not working on my NaNoWriMo project. Video from here about this. Usual caveat that if you see a gray bar, click it.

It didn’t take too much of that talk for me to understand it and realize I’ve been doing it wrong in a lot of my creative endeavors recently. In writing, or in my oft-neglected visual media, I get very goal-focused. I spend too much time thinking about the end product and I miss out on a lot of the things that makes creativity and art so wonderful which is the surprise that comes of it.

I haven’t been participating in many of the read write prompts for a while, but Nathan’s prompt and Dana’s Read Write Word were excellent prompts for me and, I think, are some of the better pieces I’ve written recently. Why? Why were those good but the image prompts escaping me? Why is Read Write Word 2 not as inspiring?

I think it has to do with being in that second form of play: building. The original prompts had so much to start with it was very neat to me to start pulling them apart and putting them back together. The first Wordle had thirty words, which I used only a portion of. The other prompts become more like the first type of play, the exploration. With so few options at our disposal, it becomes more about how many things can be done with a paper clip. And that is a situation where having knowledge gets in the way. If you don’t know what a paper-clip is, there’s no preconception, there’s nothing telling you can’t be… um… something else. Once you know, just by looking at it you wouldn’t see it as an element of wire sculpture, but once you’re holding them and molding them and twisting them together, you can build the new ideas that you would never have thought of.

Which is not to say that any type of creativity is better than any other. Seems to me they all fit different style and suit different purposes. But as a creative individual (or someone pretentious enough to cal myself one) all of these things are aspects. Some aspects may be strengths and things I should develop. Some things are weaknesses and should be avoided or worked on.

This NaNoWriMo experience is teaching me many things. I do not work as well from a blank page as I do from a full one, even if the full one is full of random nonsense things. When I was younger I used to draw (poorly). Then, I was more of a LEGO kid. It suited me better having chaos as a starting point than openness, I guess. Anyway, what are your thoughts on playing as artists and wordsmiths? How do we take those styles of play and put them into our writing practices?

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