by Naomi | May 11, 2017 | Creative Life
One of the first questions I ask writers as they develop a story character is “What are your character’s strengths?” After identifying strengths, we also think about weaknesses. However, we start by looking for those places where a character shines.
If a character has only weaknesses or is overwhelmed by life’s challenges, she doesn’t have the confidence to begin taking action. Characters who can’t take action quickly lose a reader’s interest. We want to shake them by the shoulders and say, “DO something!”
But in our own lives, we tend to focus on the problems.
What isn’t working? What do we need to fix? Maybe this approach is due to the overwhelming amount of marketing messages we encounter. These messages are craftily designed to remind us of who we are not and what we do not yet have. Savvy marketers know that when they sell a transformation, buyers buy. And yet, when we spend most of our time identifying how we ought to be transforming: personally, professionally, creatively, socially, and so on, we lose our footing. Or to be more specific, we lose our confidence.
Starting with a win is a sure way to keep winning.
I’m not talking about fooling ourselves with overly sunny self-talk. We know when we’re telling ourselves a lie. The trick is to start with a win we’ve already achieved, or one that isn’t a long shot from where we currently stand.
Research shows that a key factor to achieving a goal is belief. We must believe we are capable of success. Until we have actually conquered a challenge, we might hope we can overcome the odds, but we don’t know for sure. On the other hand, each real success adds to a track record that builds our confidence. Sounds obvious, right? Yet, we still struggle.
Why? We don’t play to our strengths.
Think about the last time you did something new. Did you first review any current skills or successes on which you might build? Or did you focus on the gap between your skills and your goals? Chances are high you focused on the gap. You’re definitely not alone!
When we consider a child who doesn’t know how to play guitar or draw or speak Spanish, we give the child the benefit of the doubt. They need time to learn this new skill set. As adults, we don’t give ourselves that grace. We look around at peers and we see their expertise. Without questioning our assumptions, we berate ourselves for what we have yet to learn. Rather than playing to our strengths, we start from our weaknesses. In most cases, this negative beginning leads to false starts, slow learning curves, and more often than not, we give up.
What if, instead, you played to your strengths?
What if your approach to learning something new went like this?
- Find a point of connection between what you currently do well and what you want to learn.
- Start with that connection point, and give yourself a small challenge. Choose a challenge you are sure you can tackle.
- When you achieve your goal, celebrate! Tiny mid-journey celebrations help us enjoy the learning process.
- Next, choose a new challenge that stretches you one step further.
- Move forward in this way, small challenge to small challenge.
- If you fail to reach a challenge, don’t fret! Return to your most recent success and analyze what you can learn from the failure. What adjustments will give you a better chance of success the next time around?
- After a few weeks or a month, look back over your progress and note how far you’ve come. Chances are high that you’ll be amazed!
Try it out, and then come on back and share the story of how it went. I’d love to hear about your journey. You can comment below, or connect with me on
Facebook or
Twitter.
Here’s to you and your creative growth!
by Naomi | May 8, 2017 | Creative Life
“A diamond gemstone is made up of facets—defined surfaces, sides which each face a particular direction and yet are all connected to one another: distinct aspects of the whole.”
― Marianne Roccaforte, Ph.D., Bridges in the Mind: An Artist’s Handbook for Everyday Living
“Meg, when people don’t know who they are, they are open either to being Xed, or Named.”
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door
“We’re afraid of writing characters different from ourselves because we’re afraid of getting it wrong. We’re afraid of what the Internet might say.”
― Gene Luen Yang
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by Naomi | May 4, 2017 | Writerly Play Activities
Visit the Writerly Play Workshop and build your revision skill set. Never heard of the WP Workshop? Learn how Writerly Play thinking strategies supercharge your creativity here.
Word after word on a page can easily lull our minds into numbness.
But when we see
word
after word
on a page
suddenly we see
differently.
A few summers ago, I took a revision workshop with Linda Sue Park. What an incredible experience! One of Linda’s strategies has become a standard part of my writing practice. She asked us to take a manuscript page and break it into lines. No line could be more than five or six words. With breathing room, it became immediately clear where prose could be tightened, where words were repetitive, or where weak verbs or nouns could be strengthened.
Somehow, when the shape of the words on the page changed, I could see my writing with new eyes.
It’s a simple but powerful tool. Many, many thanks to Linda Sue Park for adding such a transformative strategy to my bag of tricks!
Try This:
- Copy a page of your manuscript into a new document.
- Break the paragraphs into short lines of no more than six words each.
- Read through and finesse the sound, rhythm and tone of your words.
- Once you’ve revised the prose in this format, put the writing back into paragraph form.
- Do a before/after comparison. What do you notice?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and insights! Share below or connect with me on Facebook or Twitter.
by Naomi | May 1, 2017 | Writerly Play Activities
Visit the Writerly Play Studio and play your way into creative discoveries. Never heard of the WP Studio? Learn how Writerly Play thinking strategies supercharge your creativity here.
One of my first jobs was at Shanti Foundation for Peace in Evanston, IL. Indira Johnson, the artist-founder of the nonprofit, created many different kinds of community art, but my favorite was her work based on Rangoli drawing, in which women traditionally painted a pattern on the ground outside their homes. Family members would walk across this drawing each day, scattering the image, and in doing so, the blessing was spread across the community.
I had the honor of helping Indira with some of her community art sessions. We’d explore the meanings of a variety of shapes and then as a community draw a pattern that had meaning to our group. Then, the drawing would be transferred to the ground and filled in with bright spices and other materials. You can see some examples of final results here:
Community Blessings.
I came to understand that each shape has a different feel, and a different historic significance. Molly Bang explores the feeling of various shapes in her book,
Picture This: How Pictures Work. It’s a book I return to again and again because it takes this concept of shape down to the basic, underlying concepts. Molly’s images and clear explanations help me understand how shapes work in visual art, but also sparks thoughts about how shape shows up in my writing. What might the shape of a line, the shape of a poem, or the shape of a story add to (or take away from) my work?
Try This:
- Take out a few pieces of differently colored paper and cut out shapes. Cut some circles, squares, rectangles and triangles.
- Arrange your shapes into groupings. See if you can make groupings that have different tones. Can you make a calm grouping? A fierce grouping? A lazy grouping? A creative grouping?
- Choose one of your groups of images, and write a poem that captures that same tone.
- Arrange your shapes and words on a page, and then share your work with someone. Celebrate this small, creative act.
As always, I’d love to hear from you! Are there shapes that have particular meaning for you? How does shape show up in your work? Feel free to comment below, or connect with me on
Facebook or
Twitter.
by Naomi | Apr 27, 2017 | Creative Life
Have you heard of the
Napkin Academy? It’s a visual thinking online course by Dan Roam, author of
The Back of the Napkin and other insightful books. If you’re interested in significantly raising the quality of your thinking and learning life, you should check it out.
Among the many insights explored in his course, Dan highlights the fact that we remember ideas that have form. If ideas are vague or abstract, they slip out of our minds. For instance, when Google 2-Step Verification was introduced, it was a technical idea. Then, the idea of two-step security was explained with
a drawing containing two steps:
- Getting past a bear
- Escaping a snake pit
Yep! Now, with the image, we get it. Visual thinking isn’t about dumbing down concepts. It’s about making an idea memorable enough to stick.
Similarly, when I tried to better understand the creative process, and encountered abstract, scientific explanations and piles of activities, I was lost. When I finally shaped the process into a form—creativity as a ramble through five mental rooms filled with distinct thinking tools—everything came clear. Naming this creative hideout “
Writerly Play” gave further form to the idea. Each of the rooms has a different purpose, but together, they are all about story and a playful approach.
Creativity is messy, to be sure. However, if we allow ourselves to think of the process as formless, we can’t help but become lost along the way. When we make something new, we need handholds and footholds. We need structure that gives us room to experiment and make discoveries.
Finding the shape of an idea is harder than it appears. Once the challenging intellectual work has been done, the results seem simple, even obvious. However, in order to boil a complex idea down to its core, you have to wrestle through the complexity. You must break the concept into what is essential and what is secondary, down and down. You’re finished when you’ve found a shape for your idea that is simple, but still comprehensive.
What ideas are you trying to communicate right now? Consider your personal life, your creative work, your relationships, and your job. Are there thoughts you’re repeating over and over, with little result? Choose one concept you’ve tried to share recently. How might you give that concept shape?
Even if drawing isn’t your thing, when you’re shaping an idea, don’t be afraid to take out a pencil and doodle. Let your mind play with images and see what fits. Finding an idea’s shape is much more like solving a puzzle than it is like writing a definition. When you’re putting a puzzle together, you need to pick up pieces and try them out. Here, too, experimentation is your friend.
Once you’ve experimented, come on back and share! I’d love to hear the insights you gain by exploring the shape of your ideas. You can also connect with me on
Facebook and
Twitter.
Here’s to you and your creativity!
