About ten years ago, I began to look at my own creative practice and to work out what it is that I do when I’m writing “creatively”. This wasn’t just a fun diversion. I believe that thinking creatively and being creative are fundamental to our society and that now, more than ever, we need creative people to solve problems and to provide inspiration. If there is a way to learn how to do it better, it seemed to me that I could apply a skill I had learnt and developed as a teacher – something I came to recognise as breaking things down into small parts or steps – and use that skill to understand the creative process. Far from being innate, incomprehensible or something only a few people possess, I think everyone can become more creative. It comes with practice, with habit. What’s more, if people who have already developed a creative habit were to look at what they do and summarise it more often, that would provide the opportunity for a diverse and divergent understanding of what creativity means in practice.
*Freewriting: writing without stopping, without editing, without necessarily making sense.
*Creative Visualisation: holding a picture in your head, then describing it.
*Close observation: watching something very closely for a period of time OR noticing the detail in your everyday life.
*Prompts: writing from starting points, any object, line of text, place or game that starts you off.
*Live Writing: writing while in an interesting place, improvising it on the spot. Also called ‘Writing in Situ’.
When we teach these to students we call them the ‘creative toolkit’ and we add:
*Mindfulness: being aware of the moment, the opposite of striving towards the future. Pausing to look around. Applies to all the tools above.
*Wordplay: returning to (seemingly) childlike playing, to generate ideas. Messing around with words using games.
*Writers’ venues: visiting places in the community that are dedicated to writing or one aspect of it.
The tools are are never presented as prescriptive, as that would miss the point. We ask students to argue with us, to take issue with what we say, but also to trust the process, if only for one term. When I set up the exercises, it’s not about pretending that I have the answers. To paraphrase Neil Postman, learning and teaching is more about asking questions than providing answers. Instead, I say: “Here are some techniques that have worked for me. Try them out for a while. After that trial period, use them only if they help you. Develop and share your own creative tools.” At the same time, I recommend work by other writers that includes complementary or contrasting techniques, such as Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg.
Here’s an introduction to the toolkit and how to use it:
Freewriting means writing without stopping, without editing, without necessarily making sense. Freewriting is way of starting to write, a way of warming up, and a way of generating ideas. Many practitioners, such as Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg, advise us to use this tool. Freewriting brings out interesting ideas, phrases, characters and situations that can be developed in a more substantial (and later, edited) piece of writing. We use it to bypass the internal “judge”. If you have trouble starting, read about the concept of “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper. There are various versions of freewriting: some where you get a prompt to start you off, some where you simply write for a set amount of time. Start by writing for one minute without stopping, move on to five and build from there.
Creative Visualisation means – for our purposes – holding a picture in your head, concentrating on the details, then describing it, or seeing a scene from story playing out step-by-step in your head. Creative Visualisation enables us to practice thinking through our senses. Using it, we experience a place, situation or a character in our minds so that we can create writing that is authentic. It allows us to fill in the close specific details that readers love and to describe the world in new and unusual ways. It can even be a bit like method acting, if you imagine that you are the character in a particular place, looking through his / her eyes.
Close observation means watching something very closely for a period of time OR noticing the detail in your everyday life. Awareness and sensitivity are vital for writers and it is also important to open up to the world around us. Close observation refers to the use of all the senses you have available to you. In common with all of the techniques listed here, use of the senses is often the crux of the matter. We have particular uses for close observation of objects, places and people. Specificity is very important because we need to describe the world in new and unusual ways for our readers. Close observation is also about travelling through life with writer’s eyes: keeping awake, observing the world as you experience it, noticing things, telling your own story, thinking about the story behind the dropped cigarette or the lines on a face.
Prompts. These are writers’ starting points, any object, line of text, place or game that starts you off. They might be formal “rules” or constraints or they might be personal and informal. Why use prompts? Sometimes they help as a warm up. And sometimes it helps to have a concrete representation of an idea. An object, or any starting point, holds its own story; it has its own beginning, middle and end. Look long enough and you will find interesting detail to describe. Prompts helps us to focus when writing; they provide us with a constraint. Constraints enable our ideas to flourish and give them shape. They allow us to hone in on detail rather than making sweeping generalisations. You might see these called starting points, constraints, found objects, props, clues, or games. We don’t always use prompts of course, but if you get stuck, try finding any object – a pair of wellies for instance – and writing its beginning, middle and end.
Live Writing means writing while in an interesting place, improvising it on the spot, being inspired by a place. This tool is also called ‘Writing in Situ’. In a way this is a combination of the first four. Connecting place to emotion or tone is a powerful writing skill and locating yourself in an unusual or quirky location can inspire a powerful piece of writing. Live Writing combines well with all of the other tools in the toolkit. It is a kind of prompt – a radical one. It allows us to practice close observation and creative visualization but is not limited by them. (Sometimes “Live Writing” is used to mean writing live in front of an audience – that doesn’t apply when we teach it.) I’ve used this tool to write several short stories. You can see one of them online here.
Wordplay: With this tool we return to (seemingly) childlike playing, to generate ideas. Think word association, for a simple example. We mess around with words using games, or experiment with the order of words, or pairs of words. Wordplay enables us to forget formal constructions and language restrictions – and to play. It gives us a chance to practice with our natural voices, rather than writing what we think we should write. It makes it easier to create images, metaphors and similes, to give voice to unusual ideas and linguistic juxtapositions. Wordplay allows us to look closely at language, letters and sentences and to see that all kinds of language are relevant and important.
Writers’ venues: places in the community that are dedicated to writing or one aspect of it, either permanently (like the Poetry Café) or temporarily (like a Festival or reading event). We go to writers’ venues to get involved in the world of writing, to meet like-minded people and to hear about opportunities to read or submit our work. We go for inspiration, to hear talks, to attend open mic. events, to listen to advice from successful writers. The more you immerse yourself in this world, the more tacit knowledge you’ll gain about how it works.
Mindfulness: Being aware of the moment, the opposite of striving towards the future. Pausing to look around. In a way this skill is at the root of most of the techniques in the toolkit. Both mindfulness and meditation can calm the mind and help you to concentrate and focus, but here we employ the facets of mindfulness as a writing tool.
So those are the tools in the creative toolkit. Now a quick word on “the judge”, a concept we’ve taught on our writing programme since its inception.
The internal judge
All of the tools in the toolkit are designed to help us overcome your internal judge in some way. Dorothea describes “the judge in oneself” like this:
at the time of writing, nothing is more confusing than to have the alert, critical, over scrupulous rational faculty at the forefront of your mind. The tormenting doubts of one’s own ability, the self-conscious muteness that drops like a pall over the best story ideas, come from consulting the judge in oneself at the moment when it is the storyteller’s turn to be in the ascendant. (Brande, 1981: 56)
Natalie Goldberg describes this “judge in oneself” as if he or she is a critical editor:
The more clearly you know the editor, the better you can ignore it. After a while, like
the jabbering of an old drunk fool, it becomes just prattle in the background. […] Hear ‘You are boring’ as distant white laundry flapping in the breeze. Eventually it will dry up and someone miles away will fold it and take it in. Meanwhile you will continue to write. (Goldberg, 2005: 28)
The toolkit is one of the resources you can turn to when you need help to overcome this critical voice. Everyone has it. Having a concrete set of tools can help you to accept it, to laugh at it, and to befriend it.
I’ve written about ‘Defining and Shaping Creativity‘ in another blog post, which will show you some of the thinking behind this approach of reflecting on my creative practice. I’ve also published an article called ‘Small Steps to Creative Thinking’ available as a link from here. It gives some practical writing activities to try when working with the toolkit.