Sometimes when everyday life disrupts our creative activities, there isn’t enough time or energy, or even the desire to create. That can lead to extended periods when you cannot work on your project. Writers often call this “Writer’s Block.” No matter what creative form, extended periods of being unable to express your creativity can be soul-crushing. During those times, it’s helpful to do creativity exercises.
To get the most out of any creativity exercises, be curious. Be willing to fail. Not every exercise will be an immense success. But play with it. By play with it I mean, take it in, bend it, twist it until it’s an idea that appeals to you. An idea that you can express in your voice and your creative practice. Here are six powerful exercises that will help you crush creative blocks and feel creative again.
Read More
There are thousands of books out there. The more you read, the more amazing ideas will fill you. Read outside your comfort zone. If you try it and don’t get it, that’s okay. You don’t have to force yourself to read. But experiment. The more you take on board, the more your creative mind will play with those ideas and combine them in ways that will be unique to you and suit your voice.
Reading more will help you with the metaphor exercise.
Play with Metaphors
No matter what your preferred form of creativity is, you can use metaphors as a springboard for ideas.
Merriam-Webster defines metaphor as: “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in swimming in paperwork)” Shakespeare famously use metaphors. Examples: “All the world is a stage,” and “Juliet is the sun,” are just two of these vivid images he created in his plays by using metaphors.
I hear you non-writers saying this doesn’t apply to them. This can also be a figure of speech expressed in knitting or paint, or clay. Look at the work of textile artist You-Mei Huang.
Being familiar with metaphors may help you with the next exercise.
Write Poetry
No matter how you usually express your creativity, take a stab at writing poetry. No, I’m not saying become a poet. I’m saying exercise that creative brain by writing poetry. Don’t worry about whether it’s any good.
Let’s start with the simplest poem.
Haiku
Many consider haiku to be the simplest form of poetry. Haiku is three lines with a 5-7-5 syllable structure.
Monstich
Monostich poetry is a one-line poem. Here is a collection of francine j. harris’s monostich poetry.
Acrostics
As you’d expect, acrostics are poems where the first letter of each line spells a word. Start with one word, any word. Example: CAT
Crowned the Queen
And waving her majestic
Tail. — Lynette M. Burrows
Purists will say the first word in an acrostic need to have four or five-syllables, but we’re not trying to be poets. We’re just exercising our creative brains and having fun.
The second most familiar poem for most folk is a limerick. It’s a humorous five-line, AABBA, rhyme scheme poem. You may remember this one:
There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
If writing a limerick isn’t your style, maybe you’ll find the next one fun.
Cinquain
A cinquain (SIN-cain) is shape poetry and is a little more complicated than the ones above. It is an unrhymed, five-line poem typically with a 2, 4, 6, 8 and 2 syllable structure.
It starts with a one-word subject or topic as the first line. The second line contains two vivid adjectives that describe the topic. Line three is -ing action verbs that fit the topic. The fourth line is a four-word phrase that captures a feeling about the topic. And the last line is a very specific work that explains line one.
Loud Bird
Vibrant colors
Dancing, squawking, talking,
Favorite feathered family
Parrot.
-Lynette M. Burrows
I am not a skilled poet, but you can see the shape of the poem and get the idea.
From shaped poetry, let’s move on to the shape of our creative work environment.
Employ the Cathedral Effect
In the 1960s, American anthropologist Edward T. Hall explained the idea that high ceilings create feelings of freedom and openness and how that affects our cognition, creativity, and focus. He called this the Cathedral Effect.
What’s a high ceiling? Believe it or not, there is a specific range that is best for creative. Experiments determined that a ceiling of 10 feet (3.5 meters) but no higher is most conducive to creative thinking. Ceilings taller than 10 feet can create feelings of being ungrounded or unfocused.
Low ceilings can cause feelings of confinement, which encourages focused, detailed, analytical thinking.
So, next time you feel creatively stuck, try moving to a space with high ceilings. Conversely, if you need to focus on details and analytical thinking, find a space with lower ceilings.
It’s not just your environment that encourages your creativity. Look at how improvisation can help you.
Give Improv a Chance
Usually when people use the term improv, they mean actors in a skit of some kind. The word improv comes from improvisation, as in something that is performed, made, or done without preparation.
An fMRI study of 16 jazz musicians showed their brains were more likely to have auditory and sensorimotor networks activated when they improvised versus when they played from sheet music or from memory. This means that the act of improvising enabled freer creative expression because three of their brains’ networks could interact without using their executive function. (The executive function of your brain is where the planning and decision-making you do happens.) The researchers called this the Performance State or the Deeply Creative State.
Exercise your improv skills. Sitting at your creative workstation. Set a timer for a minimum of two minutes up to 10 minutes. Whether you write or knit, or throw clay, start. Even if you do the same stitch, or move, or word repeatedly. Don’t edit it. Just do it. It’s bound to open something up in your creative brain.
After your alarm sounds, then you can use your editor brain and figure out what worked or almost worked and how you might improve or use that.
Improvisation soothes the friction your executive brain functions can create, but creativity needs some friction.
Embrace Opposites
I came across this idea in a Rolling Stone article about how good art isn’t safe. It’s the idea that creativity depends on friction. Holding two opposing forces in relationship to each other allows creativity to take a new form.
Richard P. Weigand, author of that article, points out that over time friction became synonymous with harm or danger. And as I’ve mentioned many times, our brains steer us away from harm. So, we avoid friction and conflict to the point of only doing what feels safe.
For creatives, this is bad news. Seeking safety rarely allows you to express your true, unique voice in your creative work.
Weigand said when he wrote his book about the Japanese tradition of Bushido, he wrote about how in Bushido the warrior is both strong and yielding. Decisive and restrained. That the discipline of opposites (strength and yielding) creates the wholeness of Bushido.
As creatives, we need to practice holding opposites in our work. Allowing those opposites to exist together, enduring that discomfort, allows us to experience a kind of Yin and Yang that will make our work whole, maybe even great.
How do we practice that? I can’t give you a specific exercise for each creative form, but perhaps examples from creative forms I’m familiar with will help you find the opposites in yours.
In visual arts, light and dark are opposites that can create stunning pieces of art. The opposites in music can be a quick versus very slow tempo or major chords versus minor chords. In writing, it can be the idea of structure versus pantsing or the use of lots of adjectives versus the bare minimum.
I hope those examples give you ideas.
Why Should You Bother?
Every exercise above requires minimal time to complete. And like physical exercise, creative exercises can build new and strengthen skills you already have. Exercises like these can also:
- reassure you when you doubt yourself,
- give you a moment of creativity when life events steal your creative time,
- be a fun break from a long or particularly challenging work-in-progress, or
- help you explore and discover your next project.
You might just find it isn’t a bother but a way to inject a little extra into your creative work.
What creative exercises have you found helpful?
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Resources
Good Art Has Never Been Safe: Creativity, Conflict and the Power of Polarity
How Ceiling Height Influences Creativity and Focus.
New Research on the Cognitive Science of Creativity.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus.
Image Credits
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Final Image by André Santana Design André Santana from Pixabay
Choose (not too quickly) a line from a poem or the psalms that preferably has movement or a visual image.
Choose a line from a biography or scientific treatise that also has movement or a visual image.
Using either line as your first line, and the other as your last line, In 20 minutes, write a poem or narrative that plausibly (or not) connects those lines.
This exercise is a variation on the oulipian bridge. We did it for months in my writers’ group (blind-drawing preselected lines from a little box), always enjoyed it, and made Lots of loosened-up writing
Those are terrific exercises, Anna! I’ll bet they helped a lot! I’m adding them to my tools. Thanks!