Fun Things To Bring Out And Help Harness Your Creativity

Fun Things to Help Bring Out and Harness your Creativity

by Nigel Baldwin www.thewriteinn.co.uk www.nigel-baldwin.com www.nigelbaldwin.com

Drop the Slop.

This

is just basically automatic writing. I call it

Drop the Slop – others call it Morning Pages, Autopilot – because it is a way of getting rid of negative

thoughts,

negative

thinking,

petty

worries, and allowing more positive feelings, more artistic leanings to come through. We have a lot of ‘stuff’ in our subconscious/unconscious. I go into more detail about this in my Writing Course but the reason I call it Drop The Slop is because in the UK there is a process in prisons called ‘slopping out’ which is basically the taking out of the cells in the morning the bodily wastes or human excrement passed the night before. So I use the metaphor to apply to getting rid of all the waste in your mind. And to do this you’ve just got to get out of the way and dump the unwanted stuff on the page. It’s predominantly an unconscious process because it helps to write before you’ve thought about it. Basically get your self a pen and notepad (or if you can’t face looking at your scrawly writing a keyboard will do, though it doesn’t work as well for me) find some place to be alone where you are not going to be interrupted and just take half an hour or so to write about a thousand words. That’s roughly three to six pages of A4, the discrepancy in number being dependant on your handwriting. Just write. Write out the slops. It’s also a way of by-passing what the German poet Schiller called ‘the watcher at the gates of the mind’, the one who censors you, tells you how pathetic you are. Your gremlin in other words, your self-censor. What you need to do is just fill up those pages with whatever comes into your mind or psyche and not look at the results afterwards until you’ve done about ten days to two weeks of them. Because if you do you will make judgements on them 1

and the point of this exercise is not to judge the quality but to ‘Drop The Slops.’ The self-criticisms, the doubts, the fears, the ‘I-can’t-do’s’. It’s these kind of slops that stop us going forward in the first place. And never, ever show these slops to anyone else. Except when you are proud of the product. After you have dropped the slops you see, good stuff might out. This can be a very healing process. Eventually after the slops have gone the writing can become very ordered. This is also a great exercise to do if you are feeling particularly isolated. Everyone needs to vent their feelings and writing can take on the job of therapist. In earlier forms of therapy (still practised to this day in the guise of counselling and psychotherapy) we used to talk to another about what bothered us, what held us back, what we hadn’t achieved, what had hurt us. Slowly you will see a direction and patterns emerging and now these are down on paper – in form – you can begin to learn from them. Writing gives you a sense of control over your thoughts and – as when you are dropping the slop – you might well express (and I would encourage you to do so) thoughts and feelings that you harbour and that you are too ashamed to express to anyone else. Suppressed issues can be uncovered which sometimes can be disturbing, even frightening. But, remember until issues are uncovered, there can be no healing. At some level we all need – and want – healing. We have all scuffed our knees and stubbed our toes on our journey. Some have bigger wounds than others but we all could do with it. Writing can be a form of self-healing. Write what made you angry, write what hurt you, write about who humiliated you, who mistreated you. Some claim that writing is the means by which you reach the goal of creativity, implying that being creative is a union with a higher energy. When I first did this exercise, after the slops had been dropped, I started – somewhat mysteriously to me – a dialogue with what I can only call a higher part of me, something I illustrate in my writing course at www.writeinn.co.uk It was a quite a release, and something of a testament to my spiritual component, and consequently a healing.

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Four Card Stud(y) Take a pack of playing cards and deal yourself four face up. Then make a scenario up from the four you have. You must include both the suit and the denomination. (You can use the singular or the plural of the denomination.) If something comes up twice you have to use it twice. For example I have just done this and come up with the two of diamonds, four of hearts, queen of clubs and ten of hearts. So – “I woke up at two in the morning dreaming that I had been to see a concert with the four piece rock band Queen. I knew in my heart of hearts that this was impossible since they had split up and one of them had died. Freddie Mercury was a diamond singer. I counted to ten and was back in sleep as if I’d been hit on the head with a club. “ (‘Diamond’ is London UK slang for ‘wonderful’) Or – “I carried two diamonds in a pouch close to my heart. Mike had given me four but I kept the others at home. When I walked into that club at ten that night my heart was pounding. But I still felt like a queen.”

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Ace of Spades, five of diamonds, Jack of clubs, two of clubs. “I couldn’t make up my mind which club to use, the five iron or the hybrid. I’d be better off digging myself out of the rough with a spade. Sometimes I thought I didn’t bring enough clubs with me. I calculated the ball needed to travel no more than two metres. Afterwards my son Jack said the shot was ace and bought me a Diamond White to celebrate. “ (Diamond White is a very strong cider in the UK. I know nothing about golf by the way!) Or – “Ace was a big guy, upwards of two metres with shoulders that measured twenty five inches across. He once defended himself from a man with a club with one bare hand, nearly ripped his neck for his shoulders. As such, of the four of us, he did all the spade work. All the lifting, all the grunting. Me I was more of a jack of all trades, small but good at fixing and fetching things. One of the things I always fetched was a beer for us all in the middle of the day from the Diamond Club across the road.” It doesn’t matter how long it is but you’ve got to eventually use all the cards and all the denominations. Not in one sentence, you can take a whole page. By which time you’ll be well into your story. If you turn up four of the same denomination – particularly if it’s spades which is the most difficult suit – try a poem! This is great fun and somewhat challenging, but it’s also addictive so make sure it doesn’t eat into your real writing time!

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Brainstorming/Storytelling with One or More Friends I use this a lot and it’s great fun. A version of a panel/parlour game played – I should imagine – since time immemorial. I use this frequently with students and they are constantly amazed at what transpires. Even if you only have one other person to play with it’s fun. Firstly have a conversation with each one of you taking every other word. “This-morning-I-went-to-the-baker’s-for-some-bread.” Try to go as fast as you can and not think too much about it. If you can record it digitally even better. Eventually you will be speaking as one and you might have even put a coherent scenario together. Once you have, go on to the next stage. This time you have alternate sentences – or if there are more than two of you, a sentence each until everyone has had a turn and then go around again. Again, after a bit of practice, a coherent scenario will start to emerge. It helps to not be too self-conscious about this and make judgments on the quality of the material. Remember you are using it as a tool to harness your creativity not to write a proposal to submit to a publisher or producer. With students this always works, except when they make judgements. And the hardest task with students is to get them to not make judgements. And, yes, you’re allowed to stop and go back. Even if there is just the two of you. If something emerges which is interesting, even inspiring, and the next participant ‘blocks’ it, you can observe this and go back and take a different direction. It’s a ‘re-write’ if you will. You can do a version of this on your own. Firstly take a writing tool – pen, paper/computer – and write down as quickly as possible ten words consecutively which are NOT associated with the previous word. These words should represent objects/solids rather than concepts. Concepts – such as time, space, religion, philosophy – can have all sorts of unseen associations and are best steered clear of. Otherwise you might end up arguing with yourself a bit like players do when they’re arguing about a valid word in Scrabble. Objects only – living or inanimate. So: cat5

mustard-penny-clock-water-phone-paint-radio-light-television.This takes some concentration. Mostly there is usually an association. I started doing this and wrote cat-monkey which have association in that they are both animals, so start again. This will get your juices flowing. Then ten words with none of them associated out of the whole ten. So from the above example radio and television would probably have to go. Even radio and light have a bit of an association, as do radio and clock. Keep going, you’ll soon have the cobwebs cleared. Then write sentences that seem to have no association. After about ten, sit back and look at them. Where are the associations? What associations can you make? Is there a way of making the connections less tenuous? Can you firm up the connections? Rearrange the order of the sentences? Soon you should have the beginnings of a story.

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Changing Your Story/Changing the Story of Others Even if we think we can’t control everything that happens to us we can write our own story about it. As Viktor Frankl says in his book “Man's Search for Meaning” we are in charge of how we think about what happens. Quantum physics tells us reality is not as solid as it seems and that matter and events may even be malleable. How many times has something annoying happened in your life and you have heard yourself saying “It’s going to be one of those days” ? And how often have you turned out to be right and then consider yourself to be a victim of circumstances? But if quantum physics has any validity then to some extent we created it. So why not change the story: “Today is going to be a great day.” Pull yourself up when you’re telling a negative story, change it, and watch what manifests in your life. At the very least, you’ll begin to feel better about your difficult day. But, even more, you might find that what seemed initially to be a challenge or problem could turn out to be the indispensable prelude to a bunch of positive experiences. This can be difficult at first – after all we’re all conditioned into thinking we have very little control over our lives – but with practice it will come. The following is based on the preceding storytelling exercise and can benefit all involved. You can tell this on your own, with a friend or with a group of people who all take turns in telling their story and having it changed. The principle is the same whether you are on your own or with others. The more participants the more people who benefit. Tell a story about something that happened to you which wasn’t exactly great. Better to start off with minor stuff, profound traumatic material really needs a 7

very safe and formal therapeutic environment. Say it’s a story about your dog running off. After one or two sentences stop and ask what you said which was negative about the event. Try to turn the negative into a positive. It didn’t matter that it didn’t actually happen, this is a process of healing. Maybe your dog ran off and you got frantic but at the end of the day a neighbour brought him home. The negative here is you being frantic. But instead of being frantic you could say your dog had gone off on an adventure and tell that adventure culminating in the dog returning with a pouch full of money! It doesn’t matter how outrageous and untrue it might have been, this is all about healing the psyche. If you are doing this with one other then tell your story in the most negative fashion you can (exaggerate!) – one or two sentences at a time – and let your partner retell it in the positive. If you are doing it in a group use the same principle except that everyone else takes turns to put a positive spin on your story. The first person on your left takes the first two sentences and then the next person takes the next two and so on…. What happens if you tell this in a group or even to one other is that you get your positive experiences affirmed by others which will enhance your selfesteem. The idea is not to change the essential event – the dog did run off after all – the idea is to change the experiencing of it. Nothing is really negative or positive, only what we make it so. There is a very popular, very old Sufi story that illustrates this. “Hundreds of years ago, in a poor Chinese village, there lived a farmer and his son. His only material possession, apart from the land and a small hut, was a horse he had inherited from his father. One day, the horse ran away, leaving the man with no animal with which to work the land. His neighbours, who respected him for his honesty and hard work, went to his house to say how bad it was and how much they were sorry 8

for his loss. He thanked them for their visit, but said: ‘Good? Bad? Who’s to know? ’ A week later, the horse returned to its stable, but it was not alone; it brought with it a beautiful mare for company. The people of the village were thrilled when they heard the news, for only then did they understand the reply the man had given them, and they went back to the farmer’s house to congratulate him on his good fortune. ‘Instead of one horse, you’ve got two. Congratulations!’ they said. “Good? Bad? Who’s to know? “ said the farmer. A month later, the farmer’s son decided to break the mare in. However, the animal bucked wildly and threw the boy off; the boy fell badly and broke his leg. The neighbours returned to the farmer’s house, bringing gifts for the injured boy. The elders of the village sombrely presented their condolences to the father, saying how sad they all were about such a bad accident. “Good? Bad? Who’s to know?” These words left everyone open-mouthed, his son was going to be permanently crippled, how could that ever be interpreted as good? A few months went by, and Japan declared war on China. The emperor’s emissaries scoured the country for young and sturdy men to be sent to the front. When they reached the village, they recruited all the youths and young men, except the farmer’s son, whose leg had not yet mended.

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None of the recruits came back alive. The distraught villagers visited the farmer who gave them his condolences. They said how lucky he had been that his son had broken his leg when he did. The accident had had a good outcome for him. ‘Good? Bad? Who’s to know?’ said the farmer with infinite compassion and wisdom.” Events in themselves do not have meaning, we give them meaning. Give everyone in your group a chance to tell their negative stories and each one of the others change it into a positive. It becomes a very life-enhancing experience.

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Five - Words, Objects, Characters This is for the egg-heads among you. More difficult but fun because it is demanding and you get to use new words! (Or rarely used ones anyway.) Take a dictionary and choose five words that are semi-unfamiliar to you. Learn their meaning and application. Then choose five objects in the room you are sitting in, and then five characters from life or fiction (any fiction). So, I’ve just done this Words – aristology, nomogeny, heuristic, lacteal, calefacient Objects - book, computer, lamp, vase, rubber plant Characters - Desperate Dan, Popeye, Jed Bartlet, Othello, Winston Churchill Now use them all. So – “Staring, as if mesmerised, at the rubber plant is his office, sitting under the standard lamp by the fire which was distinctly calefacient, Jed Bartlet dismissed comparisons to Winston Churchill as he closed his book and contemplated re-election. In the next room he could hear one of his speech writers tapping away on the computer keyboard. He liked how his staff, and particularly Joe - affectionately known as Popeye - embraced a heuristic model of life. Jed knew the speech, addressing excess budget spending, started off with a metaphor based on the comic hero Desperate Dan. They had discussed the opening sentence. “Being a glutton Desperate Dan’s favourite hobby was aristology.” He liked Joe’s turn of phrase, but wondered if an audience would understand what he was referring to. He also liked his velvet tones. If Joe had been an actor he would have been born to play Othello. Joe and he always argued about the origin of life, Joe buying into the theory of nomogeny whereas Jed had a more religious perspective.

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Jed reached for his drink, a lacteal confection which was supposed to help him sleep. Something he had been having trouble with lately. As he did so his hand slipped and knocked a small ornamental vase from the table. It hit the floor and shattered. The typing in the other room ceased as if the typist had been suddenly struck dead.” It’s not going to win a Nobel, a Pulitzer or a Booker, but it’s great fun, and it’s surprising how you find you are using the words, mostly not in the obvious way you imagined. And you get to develop the use of your vocabulary. If not entirely new words, words re-membered. It’s also challenging, but that’s not a bad thing. Once you have done that, make one of your characters yourself. And then tell your story in the first person, changing your negatives into positives as per the ‘Changing Your Story’ exercise. Do yourself a favour, challenge yourself.

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Right and left handed If you are right handed write with your left for a page of A4. It’ll stimulate the opposite hemisphere of your brain – the creative side. Reverse if you are left-handed.

Autobiography Choose a fictional character – cartoon is permissible – and write his or her biography as if you were them. Where you were born, what you like to eat, where you want to go, your ambitions, how you came to meet your friends and colleagues. How that accident happened. How you did/didn’t marry/sleep with/go horse riding with a counterpart. What car do you drive, what are your hobbies, what clothes do you like to wear when on a date? Do you mix easily with others or are you a loner? Where do you like to go on holiday? Even if you are a fictional character it is now your autobiography, so who would play you in the movie of you? Have fun, be expansive. It’s a form of playing – which leads onto the next one.

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Learn to Play When you are stuck or blocked, unblocking is in effect allowing the creative child to come through and heal. Observe how creative children are in their playing. Play yourself. If you are embarrassed skipping along the sea shore singing a nursery rhyme then find some woods and skip where no-one can see you. The creative child you may have suppressed for so long – the one who delights in so many things – wants to come out to play. Make some musical instruments out of pots and pans, bells and jewellery, paper rolls and paper clips in small containers that you can shake, rattle and roll. Have fun. Having fun is the opposite of trying too hard – and trying too hard is sometimes what blocks us. We fret, we worry, we think we’ll never do it. Children never have those problems, so rediscover the child in you. Creativity is about having fun and playing, it’s not a duty – “I don’t want to go to the gym, but I must to lose weight/get fit.’ Whoever or whatever created the Universe had fun doing it – imagine painting in your mind all those species of living things, plants animals etc. Doubt that was duty. It was fun. It is essential to laugh more. If you can’t find something that makes you laugh then sit down and just exhale using the term ‘ha’. If you run that term together again and again ‘ha-ha-ha-ha’ as quickly as you can you won’t be able to stop yourself laughing. Works every time.

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St. George and the Dragon

(Skip this if your schooling and childhood was so perfect that you already feel that you are in the realms of the angels. Others might find it useful.) This is more a meditation than a game, but it is very useful for those who are stuck because the story they are telling of their own lives is peppered with concepts as ‘can’t-do’, ‘I-wastold-I-was-no-good’’, ‘people-always-laughed-when-I-said I wanted to write.’ We are the authors of our own lives and we can retell/rewrite the stories. I was told as a child that I would never amount to anything, which was my sole and principle motivation to stick one in the eye of my detractors. That’s because I’m recalcitrant and antiauthoritarian, so if anyone tells me what I can or can’t do I’ll do the opposite. Bloody minded if you will. But many people get stuck in the beliefs they have been fed by their family/teachers/mentors because they want to please them and be seen to be agreeable. Now, you’re going to consider yourself as a character in your story in the third person so that you can be a witness to this narrative and not be immersed in it. You are Michelle or Michael rather than ‘I’. So the story might begin “Michelle/Michael was born in London on a wet stormy night on April 1 st at five in the morning. Being born in foul weather on April Fool’s day seemed like an apt omen for the life that then transpired.” You’re not going to write “I was born in London etc…” because you are a witness. Then tell your story as other people might see you. But not your whole life’s story because it would be too long and, most likely, discourage you to do the whole exercise. Pick two or three incidents or events where you were manipulated (mostly unconsciously) into being what someone else wanted you to do or be. Embellish that story of how you fitted into other peoples’ perspectives and expectations. Tell the story (if it indeed is so) of how you complied with your parents’ wishes to be a doctor when you really wanted to be a circus clown, but tell it in the third person. And try to identify the moments when your creativity was disparaged or crushed because all children (and therefore all 15

adults, even if suppressed) are creative. It is said that all creativity comes from the inner child, but the inner child has no defence mechanisms against the disparagement of disapproving adults. This is why criticism of your creative endeavours can hurt so much. Make it about 250-1000 words depending on how healing it is for you. Okay, so then retell it how you want it to be now. How you have come to realise, despite all the obstacles, what a creative creature you are. That whatever people said about your inability to dance, sing, write, they were wrong, They thought you were an ugly duckling whereas you were really a swan. Rewrite the story so that when someone told you that you wouldn’t amount to much or, as parents, you would be much better off earning your living in business than in the arts (or whatever you want) you include a scene where your heroine/hero rejects that. This is the novel/script of your real life. Now, the third and final part. Sit and relax and go into meditation or visualisation mode and imagine you are St. George and you have come to slay the dragon which has imprisoned the damsel in distress in the castle. The damsel in distress is your true story, the dragon the old one imposed upon you when your intuition, reasoning and real desires were a hostage to fortune. Imagine St. George battling and killing the dragon and carrying off the damsel, your real story. Be as elaborate as you want about this. Your psyche will accept the gear shift.

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Expanding your Consciousness This takes some commitment but is really useful in developing an awareness to allow your stories to come through. It is also only useful if all your senses are unimpaired. If not – you have a hearing issue for example – it doesn’t mean you can’t develop your awareness, just that this exercise wouldn’t be useful for you. Once you who are blessed with unimpaired senses have mastered some of this exercise (and it is really difficult to master it all) you might find your channels much clearer and your stories come through from your ‘muse’ (whatever you perceive that to be) with an elegance that surprises you. P.D. Ouspensky, a student of Gurdjieff is credited with devising this when he asserted that most of mankind is sleepwalking through their lives. I don’t hold an opinion on that, I just know that this is useful (even though I have never mastered it completely.) It is not easy though and you need to take about half an hour to do it. Take yourself out for a walk and for the first five minutes concentrate and the visual stimuli. Not just looking but seeing – cracks in the brickwork of houses, TV aerials and satellite dishes, the plumage of birds and the colour of the leaves on the trees. Be aware of the colours and really see, as if you are a child looking through a kaleidoscope for the first time. After about five minutes (but don’t get distracted by formally looking at your watch) add to this your world of sound. The passing traffic, the voices of people, the birdsong, the distant sound of a speedboat on water, an aeroplane. Don’t let go of your visual stimuli. Ten minutes in bringing in the sensations you feel with your sense of touch. The breeze on your skin, your footsteps on the road/path, even how your clothes brush against your body. You are now conscious of three types of stimuli.

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After about fifteen minutes bring in the sense of smell – the flowers, the dust, the honeysuckle in the woods, the smell of grass after a rainfall. Now try to pay attention to all these four sensory inputs simultaneously. (If you’re a real glutton for punishment you can include taste by sucking on a sweet, but I didn’t ever take it that far.) Once you have anchored these four (or five) senses start to count your footsteps as you walk AND recite a piece of poetry that you know well or a nursery rhyme. If you do this even moderately successful you will slip into an altered state of consciousness which is akin to the meditative state which enhances creativity. You need to have patience though. I would also like to add that you can’t fail at this because it is a tool to help you unblock yourself and enhance your creativity. It’s like running: some people run five miles, other people run five minutes, it’s what it does for you that matters. Also, unlike all the other tools/games I have illustrated here this one doesn’t involve directly sitting at your desk and writing. So when you need to get out ….

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Make Friends with Your Muse

This is a contentious one, but where do your ideas come from? Now, even the most avid atheist who has thought about these matters must have asked where consciousness comes from. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, claimed that all matter was a derivative of consciousness. So what is this consciousness? I suggest it is your muse, the gods and goddesses in other dimensions tickling your creativity button. So who or what is your personal muse? That depends on your model of reality. God, the Universe, The All-That-Is, Spirit, your creativity, your Auntie Bessie. Just let it through and make friends. Yes, take some time to sit down and make friends with your muse. In epochs past when man and woman contemplated how the Universe came into being they coined the word God or Allah or Yahweh or Krishna or numerous other names. It’s simply a name expressed in symbols (letters). Our artists have since been trying to express the Divine in their paintings, music and writings. And because we know no other way we personify Him/Her/It. So God is personified as a man even though no man is God and God is not man. I have no denominational or religious views on this but often wonder where my ideas come from. So I have made friends with my Muse and sit down often to talk with him/her. My Muse metamorphoses often – sometimes he’s a middle-aged hippy in sandals and red corduroy trousers, other times she’s a gorgeous goddess in the most stunning golden robes beckoning me to an ecstasy I haven’t yet experienced. (And still haven’t as it happens. But there’s a way to go! And fun on the way!) It doesn’t matter. Make friends with that part of you/higher self/source that partners you in your creativity and give him/her/it an image you are comfortable to sit with. Then have a dialogue. And after the dialogue, record what you remember. Then make a date to meet your Muse at your desk and/or writing space the next time you approach it. It’s a yummy new date! 19

Many artists will consider their work a ‘channelling’. Nothing wrong in that, since we are all connected to the same source and each other. I’ll conclude with what Giacomo Puccini said. (Substitute the word God in the following quotation with your concept of the energy of the Universe.) Puccini when speaking about Madam Butterfly said : “The music for this opera comes from God. I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public.” And if you think it all comes from you and not something as well as you (because of course all things do come from you because you are not separate from the source) contemplate this as a wonder about how complex an organism we are and how the astronomer Fred Hoyle calculated the odds against us evolving by accident. “A living cell has a chain of amino acids: the function of these amino acids is dependent upon 1,000 to 2,000 different enzymes. The probability of a thousand different enzymes coming together in just the right way to help amino acids function in a random way over the Earth's several billions of years is 10 to the power of 40,000 to one.” In the light of that (wow!) make friends with your muse. We are creative people who with the creator created us being creative. The word Inspiration derives from in-spiritis (emanating from spirit), the word enthusiasm (a must for the creative heart) derives from en theos (emanating from God, whatever that means to you.) “In the beginning was the word” says one spiritual tradition (though I don’t adhere myself to any one specific philosophy) and other religions also place metaphysical emphasis on sound and creation being inextricably linked. Food for thought there huh? Who can deny the creative power of the word? Let’s get going!

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