Tag Archives: creativity

The antidote to writer’s block

…is this. It’s writing.

Last night before bed, I stared at a blank screen and tried writing. Nothing came to me. I started to write a number of post titles, and then I’d erase them. I looked at my saved drafts, underwhelmed and uninspired. I fell asleep working on this. I woke up with a blank page.

Fifteen minutes this morning I have stared at the blank page, thinking of a memorable moment to share, and concluding that I live a boring life. Wondering what I have of value to share, I realized that I’m stuck. If I wait any longer I will have to skip my morning workout. So I just start writing about writer’s block.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. ~Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I’ve been here before, I’ll end up here again, it’s a creative wall we must all get over. But if I skip this hurdle, and avoid writing today, it permits me to do so again. If I sit here and don’t write, not putting these words ‘out there’, then I’ll miss my workout, thus permitting my block in one area to create a block in another.

But if I write about this block again tomorrow, then I’m skipping the hurdle in a different way. So, I give myself permission to write about writer’s block today, so that these paragraphs can unblock me.

The page is no longer blank.

Good-enough-meme

Good enough is good enough, now share it!

Writing every day for the past few months, I’ve noticed that some days I’m not completely happy with what I’ve written, but I made a commitment to write every day and to share it here. Sometimes I write something that is pretty good and it gets very little uptake, sometimes the ‘good enough’ posts get more attention than I expected. However, if I’m completely honest, most of the ‘good enough’ posts are not ones that I am proud of, should be proud of, and they really don’t get any attention at all… And that’s OK. It really is.

At school, I watch perfectionism crush students. It completely overwhelms and debilitates them. It’s sad to see highly capable students buried under the weight of something not being good enough to hand in, when while it may not be their best work it actually is good enough. Last year I was actually challenging a student to hand in some mediocre work. “What’s the minimum you need to do to hand that in?”

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when I push for students to do more, and to give their best, but for some students the bar of excellence they place on their own work is so high, they are continuously challenged to attain their own high standards. And when that bar is placed on everything they do, that becomes an impossible task.

Writing here every day, I’m not going to be publishing masterpieces. But it’s a slippery slope to say to myself, ‘I just won’t post something today’. Because tomorrow might be another one of those days, and the next day I might consider the post good, but not great. Then my daily blog is no longer daily, and my passion for writing dwindles again, as it has in the past.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. We don’t have to produce great work all the time. We don’t have to impress others and showcase only our best. Social media is filled with that, with kids taking 30 selfies because the look isn’t perfect and deleting their Instagram photos because the ‘Likes’ didn’t come fast enough. Our schools have student that do not hand in an assignment because it’s not A+ quality. And adults don’t publicly share their work because they don’t have anything of value to say… not realizing that what’s obvious to them, might actually be amazing to others.

Your work is good enough… share it.

Too much choice

I’ve been thinking a lot about creative constraints recently. In the move to give students more choice and more freedom to explore their own passions and interests, we sometimes forget that constraints and limitations can help foster both creativity and work completion.

Tell kids to pick any topic to study and some will flourish while others will flounder. Tell kids they have a lot of time to work, some will engage and use it well, while others will squander that time. Tell kids they can present in any format they want, and some kids will be creative while others will choose the easiest path, (even if they love the topic they are presenting on).

We don’t always benefit from choice. 15 kinds of toothpaste to choose from doesn’t translate to us choosing the best toothpaste… and probably delays our selection time. Sometimes it’s easier if we have less choice or limits to how much time we spend on something. “Constraints aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it.”

When we put constraints on projects, limiting resources, time, scope, size, delivery, or focus, we might be restrictive and limit choice, but done with thought and purpose, we can also inspire creativity.

Publish button pangs

It’s hard to believe that I started blogging 13 years ago! I’ve gone through many different web addresses, and I’ve published things on other platforms like wikis and discussion forums, (and even in a book), but blogs are my favourite way to share.

The challenge with blogs, and even this daily one, is that all these years later I still get pangs before hitting the publish button. I still want to read over my post one more time before I commit to publishing. Is my message clear? Did I miss something? Is my grammar good? Is there a better word I could use to describe… ?

And then I still make mistakes! My last post was written on election night, and scheduled for the next morning. I woke up, meditated, re-read the post, made a few small changes, and hit the update button. All nice and easy. I dropped my kid to school and my post got published while I was seeing a teacher and some students off on a field trip. My post auto Tweets, posts to Facebook, and to LinkedIn.

I walk back to my office and I check Twitter, someone ‘Liked’ my post and on a whim, I click on it and re-read my post again, this time as a published, ‘final’ copy…

I find two typo’s. Two careless mistakes! How could I have missed these, they are so blatant! So I go to my WordPress App, click the edit button and make the changes. It’s 8:15am, the post was live for 1/2 an hour, maybe 3 people have read it, but I’m embarrassed. Ashamed. Upset with myself for being so careless.

It’s stupid. I know it is. But any work I’ve done until now to reduce the publish button pangs is gone. They are back in full force.

The weird thing though is that I like it! I like the pressure I put on myself. I believe I write better because of it. I believe I care more because of both a real, and an imagined audience. I get to be a writer! I also get to be my own editor, and I want to be excellent at both of theses things.

Let the pangs come. I want to be hesitant before hitting publish. I want to feel the pressure to do well, to not make careless mistakes, and to look things over one more time. These pangs are a badge of honour that I wear as a blogger.

_____

P.S. I’ll still make mistakes, so feel free to point them out to me. You will be doing me a favour.

P.P.S. I’ve seen students care far more about their writing because they were sharing their work publicly. They too can benefit from the publish button pangs!

I am…

I am not a slam poet,
too many stutters and ‘ummms’ would I make,
I could never recite this all in. Just. One. Take.

I am not a storyteller that captivates,
enthrals, excites, and engages,
I don’t have audiences that applaud me,
on pedestals and stages.

I am not an actor,
I don’t dream of the limelight,
I’d rather be the stagehand
working out of sight.

I am not, I am not,
I am not all of these things,
I can’t dance, I can’t play an instrument,
can’t hold a note when I sing…

It would be easy to go on.
To cut myself up critically.
It’s what ‘most’ people do,
and we all know ‘most’ is at least 51% statistically.

But for everything that I am not,
there is yet something that I am.
For every I can’t,
there are things that I can.

I can write a blog post,
and share it each day.
I can develop my ideas,
and put them on display.

I am creative,
I am thoughtful, and reflective,
I may not alway be right,
but I’m not afraid to share my perspective.

I am a writer, not a poet
though I may try,
I can still be witty, sarcastic,
and sometimes even wry.

I can share my thoughts,
I can express what I think,
For I am artist of words,
typing digital ink.

I am the thinker and creator
of this rhyming verse,
Somewhat embarrassed,
though I know it could be worse.

I am a blogger,
I express ideas our loud,
I am a digital writer,
often humbled, yet proud.

For I am a writer, daily,
and I publicly share,
My words start of private,
until I put them ‘out there’.

Out in the ether
goes my digital text,
and you’ll have to wait until tomorrow
to see what’s next…

Blank Page

Sometimes I have a thousand ideas running through my brian and I can’t get them all out.

Sometimes I look at a blank page and my mind goes to mush. My mind isn’t blank, it’s not that I’m not thinking, rather what I am thinking involves being distracted by unimportant things. Writing a daily blog puts me in a dance between these two states. Sometimes I’m driving in my car and I think of 2 or 3 things to write about in less than 5 minutes. I will create draft titles and put a sentence starter or two on the page before I hit save. (No, I don’t do this while I’m still driving.)

Other times I can sit with a blank page and have no idea what to write? I go through my drafts and don’t really want to expand on any of them. I check the news, and search some of my social media feeds, and suddenly I’m no longer writing. This is when the discipline of just starting to write is important. This post was called ‘Wrapping’ and while it might sound interesting to some, the first few lines told me that I wasn’t going to unwrap the idea. So I deleted the title and once again faced the blank page.

In ‘The War of Art‘, Steven Pressfield said, “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” I have the audio version of this book and I have listened to it twice. The fact is, that although the blank page can be intimidating, it doesn’t hold any more power over you than you give it. It can be an unapproachable mountain, it can be a desert plain, it can be a white-out blizzard, or it can just be a blank page, waiting for you to add some ink, (or digital ink).

This page is no longer blank. From the second sentence, this has been easy to write. It has taken me less time than most of my posts usually do. The words have flowed, the quote I was looking for above came up very quickly in a Google search, and so even that wasn’t a distraction. I just had to get past the blank page.

What are the blank pages that hold you back? And what can you do to get them started?

New and improved

I grew up with the 3R’s: Reduce, Reuse, and recycle. But there’s one more ‘R’ that I think is not just important, but extremely fascinating.… And that is Repurpose! You can argue that ‘repurpose’ is a form of ‘reuse’, but to me they are different enough to deserve separation.

The image that I shared is of 3 glass beer bottles, re-blown to make them into drinking glasses. Brilliant!

I love seeing objects being repurposed: A tin roof from a barn becomes the finish on a fireplace; An old ladder, hung horizontally, becomes a book shelf; An old bathtub becomes a love seat.

There is an artistic design element to this kind of repurposing that really appeals to me. I especially like when the item is identifiable for what its old function was while in its new use. Creativity and ingenuity come alive when an item is cleverly repurposed.

Beyond Rock Band

via Penang iBand does “Love Story” by Taylor Swift on youtube.com

Unlike Rock Band, you actually have to know how to play music to do what these guys are doing. Here is another group doing a Christmas concert with iPads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DJddb73OOQ

Or how about 1 guy putting all the pieces together himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYo5dCeBZYA

Garage Band comes free on Apple computers and the same ‘equipment’ would have cost about $20,000 and needed it’s own room when I was a kid. It’s just amazing what you can do these days if you have a musical or creative flare.

Taking this one step further. Have a look at what Eric Whitacre did using technology to connect “individuals alone, together.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyLX2cke-Lw

Rock band is fun, but making music is definitely beyond Rock Band!

prepare to risk being wrong

Defining 5!  » COURAGE, CONFIDENCE, OPTIMISIM!  » Rick Fabbro
What is five?

I am no longer teaching in the classroom. My work now deals mostly with principals, vice-principals, and parents. I still see my basic job as the same. How do I find ways to help people approach their challenges with courage, confidence and optimism? How do I persuade principals and vice principals that they need to be prepared to risk being wrong in order to find ways of responding creatively to the particular context of their school?

via rickfabbro.com

– – – – –

A great blog post, well worth the read. I especially like the last sentence and think it could be changed in a number of ways:

How do WE persuade *principals and vice principals* that they need to be prepared to risk being wrong in order to find ways of responding creatively to the particular context of their *school*?

Replace *principals and vice principals* and *school* with:
• teachers and class
• students and class
• my children and family
• ourselves and lives

The last one doesn’t really fit grammatically but the reality is that fear of being wrong, of failure, is such a barrier to most people that people don’t even take ‘safe’ risks.

Related: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/beg-for-foregiveness/

and this video: