Productive Creativity

Once upon a time… I didn’t “get” abstract art. I understood color, and motion, and composition, sure - after all, I’d been painting since I was a tot. And in art class, I’d gone through exercises of gradually distorting an image until it looked like something (or nothing) else - and I recognized the high level of creativity involved in turning a photo of a toaster into a series of squares and swirls.

But other than the occasional “that looks cool”, my results were lackluster, and the whole thing felt intellectual and cold.

Then I read “Drawing on the Artist Within” (a follow up to the classic “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards). With one quick exercise from the book, I grokked abstraction on an *emotional* level.

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Sometime last year, I wrote a goal-setting post as part of one of those annoying viral meme things.  Recently, Reg of Elemental Truths revived it, and I thought…. what the heck.   We’ll pull the idea out of storage, polish it up, and become annoyingly viral again!!  

Memes are pretty popular in the blogosphere, both because they make for good blog filler, and because they are great for networking and traffic building.

But about THIS meme…  

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Yesterday, the author of the "LiteMind" blog contacted me with a  personal invite to participate in his latest collaborative project/contest. 

When I say "personal invite" I don’t mean one of those generic mass e-mails with my name  filled in by bot-script.   Nope.    Luciano Passuello (isn’t that a cool name?) went beyond the usual generic stuff, adding remarks that made it clear that not only had he actually been to my blog, but that he’d paid attention, and found a way to relate to me.

Hi Tori,

I recently found out about your blog and I like it very much! I think it has a lot to do with mine, actually (I once thought about making the logo a blue brain, too… REALLY!)

The reason I contact you is to invite you to join a new collaborative project I’ve put together….

By making his invite *actually* personal (rather than pretend personal) Luciano’s effort turned a potentially cold and impersonal blog contact into the beginnings of a relationship, and he upped the likelihood that I’d submit an entry for in his "Personal Excellence" project.

Which brings me to my own tip for personal excellence: 

Make Personal Excellence… personal

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Now that National Novel Writing Month is into its sixth day, the wear and tear is starting to show. We’ve been living on pizza, coffee and Twinkies, our butts are glued to our computer chairs and we’re short on sleep -  it’s no wonder our creativity is abandoning us!

Step one? Go get a glass of water.  Yes, Now.  You’ve been staring at that screen too long and you’re probably a bit dehydrated. 

And while you’re up, do some stretches.  Move around. Get the blood flowing!

Your brain works best when your body is in motion, and no, wiggling your fingers on a keyboard does not count as "being in motion" smarty pants.   Just for that, I want you to walk around the house for the next five minutes.  

Oh, come on.  It’s just five minutes.   You are not going to fall behind on your word count because you took a five minute motion break - in fact, by moving around, you’ll probably get those thoughts moving  a bit more freely.

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Writing is among the least expensive hobbies out there - so long as you focus on actual writing, and not tools, toys, seminars and other accoutrements that more often than not, keep us from writing. But it’s a rare aspiring writer who can resist the search for shiny new tools - and I found a few real gems this year.

1.

In fifth grade, Miss Duncan taught us to use index cards to take notes and organize our reports and papers. There was something immensely satisfying about moving those cards around just so… shifting a quote here, a notation there. As an adult, I’ve longed for a means of organizing my thoughts that way - hopefully one that accounted for my now-horrific hand writing.

So when I discovered this nifty little software program that works with virtual index cards that actually look like index cards, I got pretty excited. You can create piles of cards, move the piles within one another, re-order the cards, tag and sort the cards with keywords, color them, mark them according to the intensity of the scene, and so on.

It’s really quite cool.

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