by Naomi | Jan 4, 2019 | Writerly Play Activities
Do you have unexplored creative potential?
A mentor can help you identify and explore new territory.
When people ask me about the value of grad school, I always say that working with mentors saved me years of trial and error. In-person mentors are invaluable, and if you have the opportunity to work with one, I say go for it!
There is also much to gain from mentoring with master artists and thinkers who may not be accessable without a time machine or millions of dollars. Books, podcasts, videos, online courses … in this information age, we have a vast landscape to explore. So vast, that sometimes it’s overwhelming. That’s why I put together a collection of activities for thinkers of all varieties, all focused on choosing the best expert mentor for YOU.
Mentoring with master artists and thinkers is one of the core skills developed in the Writerly Play Library.
The Writerly Play Library, like the other Writerly Play rooms, is designed to help creatives separate their thinking into distinct steps. By knowing the purpose of a thinking task, we can make any activity more productive and achieve stronger results.
Here is a collection of Writerly Play activities designed to help you choose your dream mentor.
Choose the activity that best fits your creativity style. Not sure what your style is? Take the quick quiz and find out.
FOR ARCHITECTS
Use insight from three experts to lead you to the perfect-fit mentor.
Try This
FOR SPECIAL AGENTS
Focus on one expert in this strategic learning exercise.
Try This
FOR COLLABORATORS
Explore what’s important to you in your idea by digging deep with a friend.
Try This
FOR INVENTORS
Identify one-of-a-kind insights by connecting wisdom from an eclectic group of experts.
Try This
by Naomi | Apr 10, 2018 | Creative Life
If we had a Richter scale for the magnitude of a stuck story, I wonder if I could take my lesser moments of frustration more seriously. Maybe I could be more strategic about tackling them for what they actually are … stuck moments. Consider the possible scale. A 4.0 stuck moment causes disturbance and noise, but not too much damage. A 6.0 stuck moment is powerful, and may cause serious problems depending on the situation. Any stuck moment 7.0 and above creates visible shockwaves, destruction and often topples entire projects. Most of my stuck moments register around 4.0. They don’t destroy my momentum, but they still cause disturbance and noise.
A Stuck Story
I’m busy with a number of content development projects, so recently I haven’t spent a lot of time on my latest novel. I’ve accepted that ebb and flow in my creative process. However, I haven’t been taking 15-minute experimental moments to simply noodle around with my novel. I normally would play around that way in any demanding season. I’d find that exploration joyful. Even if it’s not the moment to do full-scale revision, I’m still a writer. And writers need stories to engage their imaginations–always. Except that I haven’t been doing those healthy, creative things. I’ve been in a 4.0 stuck moment.
The trouble had to do with the climax. Usually, when I start a story, I see the climax as an image or a movie in my mind. I brainstorm, plan and write toward that vision, leaving room for surprises along the way. In my current novel, I had an image, but it happened six chapters into the story. Thus, I was adrift when I passed that moment into the heart of the plot. Not to be discouraged, I wrote my way into the fog, and finished a draft.
The climax turned out to be a battle of wills. Physically, this moment was utterly anticlimactic. My finished draft left me disappointed and unimpressed. Now, I’ve written eleven novels at this point, so a little disappointment isn’t enough to register a 7.0 stuck moment. I figured it wasn’t a big deal. I’d come back when I had a better idea.
The Stuck Story Lingers
Except I didn’t have a better idea. Worse, I started feeling fuzzy around my edges. I knew something was lacking, but didn’t know what was wrong. The problem? I was a writer without a story. My imagination was bored.
This weekend, I went to see Wrinkle in Time for a second time. One thing I explore in Writerly Play is the value of using the Library. This means looking closely at art–books, paintings, music, performances, film, sculpture, you name it. In particular, I considering an artwork a second or third time is significant. The first time through, we’re caught up in the experience. We ought to be. However, follow-up experiences can be more intentional. We can think about the what, how, and why.
While watching the climax scene in A Wrinkle in Time, I understood what had been bothering me about my standoff scene in my novel. The obvious realization that “something had to happen,” may sound trivial, but the value of the discovery was in the specificity of the movie’s successful climax. First, watching a well-crafted, active climax involving a battle of wills made hope glimmer at the end of my tunnel. It could be done. Second, the colors, shapes, movement, pacing and dialogue gave me concrete elements to consider. How might each of those elements play out in my story?
Beyond Imitation
I used to be so afraid of imitation that I limited my creativity. I’ve started to see that examining the specifics of a beautiful artwork helps me to take my own work to another level. As I’ve become more confident in my own voice, I’ve learned how to gain insight from masterworks while remaining true to myself as an artist.
For me, the next step seems to be making a practical connection between 4.0 stuck moments and intentional exploration of lenses. Rather than walking away from stuck stories and hoping my subconscious will reengage, maybe I could seek out doorways into that exploration. Little stuck story moments may not be earth-shattering, but they are still uncomfortable, and life would be happier and more colorful if I could limit them. Lenses invite my imagination out to play. They aren’t about responsibly fixing problems, but rather about the process of discovery.
What Lenses Might You Try?
I’d love to hear your ideas. What lenses have helped (or might help!) you see your work in a new light? Please share in the comments or tag me on Facebook or Instagram. Let’s inspire one another … and banish those stuck stories!
by Naomi | Nov 21, 2016 | Teaching Strategies
There aren’t many things in your life that you only do once. However, most of us don’t take the time to consider how we might streamline routine activities. For instance, how often do you:
- Sort the mail
- Do the laundry
- Go grocery shopping
- Pay bills
- Pack your bag for the next day’s activities
These activities are only the tip of the iceberg. Research shows that on average people spend one hour a day looking for stuff. Those little frustrations add up, and make the difference between a settled or scattered day.
We know there’s a better way, but we feel so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the little issues to solve, that we decide to ignore them. Or, we shrug our shoulders and figure this is just the way things are. We have no vision for how our days might go differently.
Now, imagine that you worked for Disneyland, and you were assigned to do a routine activity, such as help people board a ride, serve people lunch, or remove litter from the sidewalk. Would you do your job differently each time? Absolutely not. Not only would you have a system, you and your supervisor would have given thought to how you could not only make the task efficient and manageable, but you’d consider how you could add a little “magic.”
What if you used this approach in your daily life? What if you asked yourself: “How could I not only sort the mail more efficiently, but with a little magic?”
Try this:
- Choose one routine task you’d like to revise. Give yourself permission to choose one, even though you’re sure to have a number of options. Start with one, and use your success to move on to the next.
- Seek out an inspiring process to study. Many times, unusual connections can yield helpful results here. Rather than trying to find someone else who has the perfect mail-sorting routine, you might find inspiration in the way a Kindergarten teacher helps students organize take-home papers, or in the way a librarian sorts returned books.
- Identify the key steps of the process. If you’re a visual thinker, consider drawing a diagram.
- Consider why the process works. How might you apply the success of the process to your own task?
- Sketch or write up a template for your new process. Experiment and stay open to revision as you try out the new approach. Aim high. Don’t stop until you achieve inspiring results.
- Build on your success by working on a new task.
Writerly Play offers a framework for creative thinking. In each mental room, we tackle different thinking tasks. This activity is a tool for your Library, where we analyze resources, identify strategies for specific solutions and play with them until we make them our own.
by Naomi | Aug 29, 2016 | Creative Life
It’s time for the Writerly Play Library, one of the most powerful–and most often forgotten–rooms.
If you’re joining this series mid-stream and wondering what in the world the Writerly Play Library is, you might find it helpful to start at the beginning.
Out of the five mental spaces in the creative landscape of Writerly Play, the Library is the one that has made the most difference in my creative development. Sometimes people have difficulty distinguishing between the Writerly Play Workshop and the Writerly Play Library. If that’s true for you, not to worry! In fact, I recommend installing a rotating bookcase between the two. Unlike the distance needed between the Writerly Play Studio and the Workshop, the Library and the Workshop are close neighbors, and their tools inform one another.
If the rooms are so closely related, why not knock the walls down and make them one? In this case, the separation is a reminder. In the Workshop, we look closely at our own work. We analyze what works and doesn’t in our own projects. We find areas of growth. But, what then? It’s time to pass through to the Library. We need to study masterworks, analyze what’s working and why, and then reverse-engineer success.
In the Library, you’re invited to study masterworks in many genres—analyzing, identifying strengths, and applying what you learn to your own work.
Like in our neighborhood libraries, we’re likely to start with the most familiar stacks. Maybe our favorite area of the Writerly Play Library is a shelf filled with books like ours. Remember to follow your curiosity. Unexpected connections can spark entirely new ways of thinking. Study sculpture, paintings, performances, and photographs. Find insight in the rhythm of a tango for the structure of your narrative poem. Find tone in a pen-and-ink sketch to try in your next script.
What type of doorway will invite your curious, investigative self out to play? Although the Workshop is an important entry point for the Library, you’ll want to install passageways between the other rooms and the Library, too. No matter what kind of obstacle you’re facing, the Library holds inspiration that can help you move forward. Design your doorways, and then choose one, and come inside.
Look around. Libraries come in all sizes and styles. How does yours look?
Do you have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves? Does it look more like a museum? Maybe it’s not a room at all, but rather a rambling building filled with performance spaces, listening rooms and study nooks.
The more you engage with Library thinking, the more you’ll push beyond your current skill level and into new territory.
The core skills in the Writerly Play Library include:
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Choosing a Lens
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Picking a Mentor
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Finding Patterns
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Identifying Strengths
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Reverse Engineering
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Personalizing Strategies
In order to play to your strengths while thinking in these ways, what tools, strategies or supplies ought to be in your Library? What tried-and-true strategies do you have? What kinds of tools or activities would you like to seek out?
Add to your toolkit or list. And if you’d like to explore some additional possibilities, here’s my recent list of Library tools and strategies.
How do you tend to use your Writerly Play Workshop and Writerly Play Library? Do you keep the door open between them? Like so many others, do you tend to forget the power of the Library? Are there Library resources that you haven’t yet used, but that you’re curious to examine more closely?
We have only one room left in The Nuts and Bolts of Writerly Play. That’s not to say that you or I won’t discover additional rooms in the future. The beauty of a loose framework like Writerly Play is that there’s always room to explore and grow. Tomorrow, we’ll make our way to the Writerly Play Cafe. See you soon!
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