Category Archives for Creativity
Practical Creativity: 7 Tips for Silencing Your Self-Critic
“This article is terrible.”
“You call this writing?”
“Everything you have to say is boring.”
“You’re just not good enough.”
These are the kinds of things you’d expect to hear from a horrible boss, a troll in the comments, or a cruel bully.
Yet too often, these are the kinds of things that we say to ourselves.
We may claim that this way of speaking to ourselves and attacking our writing is useful: It’s just us being realistic and giving ourselves an honest self-critique. After all, Simon Cowell was the best judge, right? So why should we be Paula Abdul, overenthusiastically praising ourselves?
But this sort of thinking isn’t constructive criticism. It’s just, well, mean.
How Seasonal Changes Affect Your Creative Process
“Nature is a writer
Springtime is a poet
Winter – dull but brilliant prose master
Summer, butterflies for apostrophes
Autumn an artist, colors with words implied …”
— Terri Guillemets, “Nature’s Inkpen”
Rules of the Writing Road
About an hour east of Chicago, I looked at my college roommate, who was at that moment driving a large moving truck towing a car, and said, “There’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out, and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it.”
If you’re on a road trip, especially one anywhere in the general vicinity of the great city of Chicago, you’re pretty much contractually obligated to quote The Blues Brothers.
Whether you’re “on a mission from God,” hitting the road with your best friend to escape a sedate life, or headed to a drag queen pageant, road trips are the basis for a lot of stories, both personal and fictionalized.
What Type of Writer Are You? How Emotions Affect Your Creativity
Social Media has created monsters of us all.
Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration.
But it has changed the way we express ourselves. For the better and for the worse.
When you’re happy, you want to share it with the world. So, you open up Facebook or Twitter, or even your blog, and you write about it. Maybe you post it with a selfie or set your mood to “elated,” and you bask in the support and adoration of your friends and followers.
On the flip side, when you’re upset, it’s so easy to type out all your frustrations and vent to hundreds of people at once with just the click of a button.