On the days when your idea pipe clogs, here are some creativity exercises for writers to pop your brain and get the stories flowing again!

Add a Goblin

Goblins are little agents of chaos. These weird-looking creatures exude a scary/cute vibe, moving with a sketchy abandon. Favorite pastimes include breaking important objects, losing essential items, and screaming nonsense at random passers-by. This character embraces the ideal of being a danger to himself and others.

And that’s just what you need for your stalled storyline. Splashing pandemonium across your writing pushes your imagination in a novel way.

Make a copy of the scene to be goblin-ified. Never work with the original. This exercise breaks the scene as it opens your mind. While you might want to incorporate ideas from this exercise, you’ll probably not want to make these changes permanent. Making a copy allows you some peace of mind as you loose your goblin amongst the good(ish?) people of your tale.

Now, add your goblin to the mix. You might choose to incorporate a real goblin, a paranormal creature menacing the charming town you’ve created. Maybe your goblin is in the head of your main character, encouraging her to sleep with her sister’s husband or give an imperious speech about the values of temperance. An invisible goblin might scamper around the room, hiding keys and leaving shoes on the floor for the characters to trip over, turning the entire dramatic scene into a slapstick farce.

Let your goblin run free!

When your goblin has absolutely destroyed everything, wait a day and then read through what you’ve written. See what new values and traits your characters revealed when thrown into this chaos. Pluck interesting changes out of the wreckage. Salvage the ideas that work and send the rest to the junkyard.

Image Play

A provocative image can push you to new heights of imagination. Find an image that you like and begin asking questions about it. If there’s a person in the frame, what are they thinking? What are they doing? How do they feel about what they are doing?

Looking at a landscape? Take the scene that’s giving you trouble and plop it into the middle of this space. How does it change the characters? Do they react differently? What new events unfold?

Or maybe you just need to work on your descriptive skills. Pull up an image and describe it, using the most flowery or sparse language possible. Use similes, metaphors, adjectives and adverbs with abandon.

A couple of my favorite places to find images are Museo and the Rijksmuseum.

Your Story Garden

Sometimes we need help with the whole story. If this is the case, try reimagining the tale as a garden. When you imagine your novel as a garden, what does it look like? Draw out your garden plan without thinking too much about it.

What season are you experiencing?

Is the landscape full of meandering paths? Maybe it’s a strictly formal garden, flowers regimented in rows. Or do you see something more like a corn maze?

What buildings are in your garden? How about water? What plants are growing? Any garden furniture? Does wildlife make a home in your garden?

Whether the images seem to go together or not, allow them to nestle into your landscape plan. This garden is imaginary, so everything is invited!

When you are done sketching the bones, pull out your colored pencils, markers, crayons, and paints! Add some color to your sketch and bring the image to life.

After you have completed the piece, set it aside for a day. When you return to it, what do you notice? What do each of the choices you made say about your work? Is there meaning hiding under the lilies? Does clarity fill the central fountain?

The Curiosity Card Catalog

Way back when rocks were soft and dinosaurs roamed the earth, we used a card catalog to keep track of all of the books in the library.

In your Curiosity Card Catalog, we delve into your local library’s stacks randomly and see what pops out!

Grab some dice (bonus if you have ten-sided ones) and head to your local library.

The nonfiction section of the library is organized according to the Dewey Decimal system. Within this section, a series of three numbers are used on the side of each book. These numbers range from 000 to 999.

We’re going to randomly select three numbers using the dice.

Since you need numbers between one and ten, use whatever combination of dice you need. A single ten-sided die will serve you well in this situation, as the 10 can serve as a zero.

At the library, throw your dice to select your three numbers.

Whatever number comes up, head into the nonfiction section and find the appropriate selection of books. Grab the first one that sparks any sort of interest.

Repeat the whole exercise at least two more times.

Take your three books and skim them, either at home or in the library. Dip in further when something catches your eye. Indulge your curiosity by doing further research.

Someone Else’s Life

While in a busy environment, say the gate at the airport or a crowded beach, select a person and watch them. Get curious, but don’t stalk them.

Maybe stalk them just a teeny tiny bit.

Ask questions as you observe. Why are they lingering on that particular park bench? Who are they rushing toward as they zip through the terminal? What prompted her to wear a thong bikini with a sparkly gold net cover up to Trader Joe’s?

Let their look, actions, and belongings build a persona in your head. Select an origin and a destination for their trip. Imagine their home. What’s their job?

Build a full life for them. Add all of the details you can. Tell the story of the woman in the bikini making a dinner of frozen fried rice and Barolo for her lover, of the fellow standing at the door of his childhood home and trying to decide if he should knock or just walk inside, of the person lying on the beach in Bora-Bora with an arm outstretched to brush the skin of their life partner.

Once the character is in your head, take a moment to write their story in your journal.

And Finally…

If you need more inspiration, click over to my very first post for DIYMFA which included five completely different creativity exercises to pop your brain.

This is my last regular post for DIYMFA and I want to say what an honor it’s been to encourage you in your creative goals! Keep writing, my friends. I can’t wait to read your stories.

LA (as in tra-la-la) Bourgeois is a certified Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coach who empowers you to embrace JOY as you manifest your creative goals through her Creativity and Business Coaching. Battle resistance, procrastination, and overwhelm with her at your side, gently encouraging with humor and heart. Discover more at her website, labourgeois.biz.

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You see, our minds continually try to find patterns, manifesting dogs in clouds and faces on potatoes. Our brains want to find the order of a pattern in the chaos of our experience. This need promotes the formation of new connections. By introducing yourself, your mind, your body to new patterns, you can find inspiration anywhere and anytime.

Creativity exercises encourage these new connections. Here are some of my favorites to fire up my writing muse and get my fingers typing.

1. The Spiral Meditation

Does your day fill quickly with distractions? Mine does—lists of tasks to complete, books to read, calls to make. My being calls out for peace, and I know that if I can’t get back to center again, I won’t be productive.

In these circumstances, I perform my spiral meditation. To do this meditation, you need a pen, a blank page, and some quiet music or a soothing voice recording. Keep your journal nearby as well.

Find a quiet space, somewhere you can isolate yourself from distraction. If disturbing noises are unavoidable, put on your headphones.

Begin by hitting play on your selected song or reading.

Using your pen, start at the center of your blank page and draw a spiral. Make the lines as close together as you can without the lines touching. Do not lift your pen from the page. Continue to draw the spiral for the entire song or until your soothing voice has read to you for a few minutes. Just a few moments of this activity calms the mind and centers your soul.

Once the song or reading is over, put down the pen and close your eyes. Let your mind clear. If thoughts intrude, allow them to drift away. Refocus your mind on that nothingness. Stay in this state for as long as you want.

When you open your eyes, take a moment and write any thoughts that entered your mind during your meditation. Return to your writing work with a new focus, ready to embrace the messages from your writing muse.

2. Make a Comic Strip

Even if you don’t think you can draw, you can make a comic strip! This exercise flips your brain by making you look at your work through pictures and the briefest of words. Making a comic strip forces you to confine your work into four squares. Drawing pictures encourages you to view your work from another angle.

Give it a try by working on a scene from your story or practice on an event that happened to you in the past week. What caught your eye and your imagination? Did the Batmobile pass you on the highway? Maybe you made a joke with the cashier at the grocery store. Use that happening to inspire your cartoon.

On a blank piece of paper, draw four squares and tell your story with pictures drawn inside them. Here’s mine:

You don’t have to be Michelangelo. Have fun!

3. The Most Precious Possession

Do you need to flesh out a character? Maybe you want to create someone brand new. The Most Precious Possession uses an object to develop a character filled with quirks.

Reach into your junk drawer and select a random object. Pretend that it is the most precious possession of someone. Describe that person—give them a name, a way of dressing, a place to live. Tell the story of how that thing became their most precious possession.

If you have a character that you’re struggling with, you might already have identified their most precious possession. Conjure up the picture of the thing in your mind and follow the same formula. For instance, does your main character have a stalker? Your main character is that stalker’s most precious possession. Delve into the darkness, joy, and madness that makes it happen. You’ll discover a lot about the stalker, and probably more about your main character than you realized before.

This exercise works quite as well with your character’s bejeweled necklace or tattered old sweater.

4. Do Your Verbs

Do Your Verbs combines creativity and physicality. To play along, pick an action verb and then mime doing it. Experiment with all of the ways you could possibly do this verb. For example, let’s say you pick “Run” as your verb. Jog slowly, an out-of-shape person resolving to strengthen their bones. Leap like a gazelle across the savannah. Scurry like a mouse escaping a cat.

Use this exercise to develop your action in a scene. Pluck an action out of the scene and physically perform it. Feel the difference as you play with the variations. Bring your character to life and embody the ways the scene could go depending on how they move. Take those motions and describe them on the page.

Having the physical memory of the action in your body brings specificity to your words, drawing a visceral picture for your reader. Reading that your character disobeyed his mother is different from reading that he “defied” her or he “sneaked around” her. This exercise helps you define those subtleties.

A great resource to accompany this exercise is Actions: The Actors’ Thesaurus. Filled with action verbs, this book delivers a myriad of options.

5. Be a Creative Outlaw

Sometimes, you need to break some rules. If you are stuck in a scene, can’t dream up a new idea, or just aren’t feeling it today, try being a creative outlaw!

You know that story that you don’t think you’re talented enough to write? Write it anyway.

How about the incredibly inappropriate one? You know it—it’s not age or gender or skin appropriate, but it took your heart and won’t let go. Write the words anyway. Free it from your soul.

Pick your most indulgent, treasured, precious idea and begin. Drop your other projects. Swing into this new idea and plunder it like a swashbuckling archaeologist digging through a tomb.

Be responsible tomorrow. And maybe burn the inappropriate story.

Creativity Exercises Fire Up Your Muse

Bring new life to your work with these creativity exercises. Not all of them may work for you, but experimenting sure is fun!

Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg. You can find more in books like The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp invented the “Do a Verb” exercise) and The Awe-Manac. I learned a version of “Most Precious Possession” from the knitting innovator, Cat Bordhi.

You may never know when your muse will appear, but you can invite her to play. Use creativity exercises to fire up your imagination and get your fingers writing!

Bibliography:

Badonsky, Jill. The Awe-Manac. Running Press Book Publishers, 2008.

Caldarone, Marina and Lloyd-Williams, Maggie. Actions: The Actors’ Thesaurus. Drama Publishers, 2004.

Tharp, Twyla with Reiter, Mark. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide. Simon & Schuster, 2003

LA (as in tra-la-la) Bourgeois coaches writers, makers, and other creatives to grow their creative businesses and break away from their day jobs! As a creativity & business coach, she believes that exploring your creativity invites joy into your life, embracing your creativity infuses your life with joy, and manifesting your creativity gives you a joyous purpose. Writing and knitting are her nonnegotiable mediums, and she can usually be found with a pen or knitting needles in her hands. Find her free guide, “Tricking Yourself into a Creative Habit” online at labourgeois.biz and start writing those words today. She can’t wait to read them!

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