by Naomi | Sep 22, 2016 | Tools & Apps
My playlist is an eclectic collection of tools that help me approach my work as play. My hope is that they’ll do the same for you.
Object: Sorting ideas and options into now, queue and later categories.
What Didn’t Work: Keeping a loose mental list of all the books I wanted to read and ending up feeling forever behind, taking the next action on all the projects on my mind, and all the ones that anyone talked about on the most recent podcast that I realized I “really should do,” hoping that I’d recall a blog post or lesson plan when the opportunity to repurpose material arose.
My Aha! Moment: When I learned my primary creative style is Inventor, I dug deeper into what this style meant about my thinking. First, I learned I’m a visual thinker. No wonder databases and spreadsheets made my head hurt. I examined how the Inventor style expresses itself in my personal creative process, and realized that my strengths are in ideation and implementation. So, I have an idea and then I act. This loop repeats at speed. Projects layer on top of projects until I’m buried. My own deadlines are forced to defer to the “hard” deadlines provided by others, and I end up frustrated. The projects I care about most move along at a snail’s pace because I’m doing forty of them simultaneously.
I imagined how I’d like my process to work. I pictured a colorful machine with various chutes and conveyer belts all sending material to an “action zone,” where projects could be completed, wrapped in shiny paper, and sent on their way. What I needed was a tool that could queue up my ideas, allowing me to easily sort and resort them. Rather than immediately acting on new ideas, I needed to put them into the “machine” where I could see them lined up against all the queued ideas.
Enter Airtable. It’s a database, yes, but the data can be viewed visually. Many relationships can be built to categorize ideas and sort them based on the criteria of the moment. Re-ordering is as simple as drag and drop. My imagined idea machine might not exist, but with Airtable, I could build a close enough replica to manage and streamline my work-flow.
How I Play:
- I created bases for books, for ideas, and for my blog posts to start.
- I set up fields for images (such as cover images or blog post images) so when I viewed my bases as cards, they’d be visually appealing.
- I created categories so that I could sort the entries in the various ways I would want to see them. For example, in the book base I used “creativity,” “mystery,” and “literary fiction,” as a few of my categories.
- I also created a field called status. Here, I can sort ideas or books into “now,” “queue,” “consider,” and “finished.”
Player’s Notes:
- Airtable allows the user to create links between records. So, for instance, in the book base, I have a table for books and another for authors. Books and their authors can be linked, to make for additional sorting options.
- The sample bases in Airtable are entertaining and offer a fantastic introduction for new users. Try them out, have some fun, and let yourself play. Especially if databases aren’t your thing, approaching the process from a playful vantage point will help you blast past the difficult parts of getting your ideal system set up.
Take it to the Next Level:
- Zapier and IFTTT are two automation tools that work in collaboration with Airtable. This means, for instance, you can set up an email link so that whenever an idea pops into your mind or someone recommends a book, you can send the info to your base on the spot.
Sometimes tools that offer many options and functionalities can cause overwhelm. Rather than allow myself to lose focus by considering every possible function for Airtable, I started with a few that felt most immediate and important. If you try out the tool for yourself, I encourage you to start wherever you are. Let your system evolve. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the perfect.
We hire professional organizers to help us conquer our closets because sometimes we simply need outside perspective. We often need similar help with our creative process. If you could use a strategy mentorship to help you tackle a thinking or work-flow mess, I’d love to help! Check out the opportunity here.
by Naomi | Sep 19, 2016 | Creative Life
If I asked you to pick up a pencil and free-write about an experience that caught your interest in the past day or so, chances are, it would take you a while to come up with an idea.
How many of our daily experiences do we remember?
Already this morning, I’ve taken my dog for a walk around the park. I popped out to Trader Joe’s on a quick errand and then went for a run around our local rose garden. If you asked me before I pushed myself to remember, I’d say, “Nothing much happened this morning.”
However, in point of fact, I had a mildly embarrassing moment when my dog snapped at a neighbor’s dog who was running around off leash. The Trader Joe’s clerk asked me my cat’s breed (I was buying litter), and when I told him she is black with a white patch, he said, “Oh, a tuxedo cat.” He insisted this was an official breed, which left me wanting to consult Google. On my run, a kind crosswalk guard helped me across a street. Also, I observed a man training his puppy. The puppy tugged, bounded, and every once in a while, sat, while they walked around the rose garden.
Many of the people I met could inspire character ideas. The sounds, smells, or colors might provide visual inspiration for a room remodel. Some of the interactions might provide metaphors to aid my problem solving. For instance: How could picturing my role as a helpful crossing guard provide new perspective on this situation? The truth is, life brims with material that lays the foundation for creativity to strike.
Unfortunately, we often miss the rich material our lives offer.
The first task of the Attic is to collect ideas and information from your world. If you’re wondering what the Attic is, here’s the short description. The Attic is one mental room we enter during the creative process. In the Attic, we gather ideas, sort them, and identify a creative question or challenge statement that points our creative problem solving in the right direction. If you’d like the longer description of the Attic, or want to know more about the full set of mental rooms, read more here.
Like much in the creative thinking process, collecting happens whether you try to or not. However, if we don’t have an intentional collection practice, there are a number of drawbacks.
What happens when we don’t intentionally collect moments from our lives?
1. We end up with a collection of the wrong things.
Science tells us that negative thoughts and experiences are like velcro. They stick easily. Positive experiences are more like teflon. They are strong, but slippery. Neurologists tell us that in order to impress a positive memory into our memory, we must focus on it for at least 15 seconds. We need proactive ideas and a positive outlook to fuel our creativity, and thus, we need to be intentional about what we mentally collect.
2. We end up with mental clutter.
If we rely on memory to serve as our mental collection bin, we’re forced to sort through everything in order to find the moments that might be useful. Like any unappealing junk drawer, we tend to shut the clutter out of sight rather than utilize it in any meaningful way.
3. We lose ideas or memories that could be highly useful to our projects.
Our brains aren’t computers, and they don’t have a reliable search function. Worse, if we ignore the ideas that pop into our heads at odd moments, our subconscious is likely to determine that we don’t care about those ideas. Then, those thoughts become harder to access a second time.
So, how can we be intentional about our collection practice?
1. Start where you are.
The harder you make collection, the less likely you’ll regularly do it. So, go with the first strategy that comes to mind–it’s likely be an approach that comes naturally to you. Maybe you’ll take photos, or write in a journal, or set a timer for a certain time each day when you’ll list some thoughts in Evernote that you don’t want to forget.
2. Make collecting convenient.
Choose an app that automatically collects your photos into an album. Find a sketchbook that’s small enough to fit in a bag you regularly carry. Come up with three standard questions to answer in your journal so you don’t have to start with a blank page every day.
3. Give yourself a boost.
Starting a new habit can be difficult. Consider your style. (And if you haven’t taken the creativity styles quiz, there’s no time like the present!) Given your strengths, what will give your collecting habit a boost? A reminder alarm on your phone? A periodic check-in with a friend? A block of fifteen minutes on your daily calendar? A colorful post-it tracking system for your office wall?
Do you want to make sure that when you need it, creativity will strike? If so, you need a collection action plan. Choose a next action right now, and if you’d like, share it in the comments below. Where might you start? If you need some extra inspiration, you might enjoy reading about my Thoughtbox, the simple system I’ve created for my own collection process.
by Naomi | Sep 12, 2016 | Creative Life
Creativity is like a fingerprint, unique to each person. And yet, there are also recognizable creative styles. Understanding our general thinking patterns can be very powerful. For one thing, when we notice our preferences, we’re more likely to also see our blind spots.
Recently, I took a course on creativity from the Great Courses Plus called The Creative Thinkers Toolkit. One highlight was the Creative Problem Solving Model, which identifies four steps to creative thinking. They are:
- Clarify: We sharpen our understanding of the problem so that our idea-generation energy is focused and effective.
- Ideate: We think widely to come up with many options (divergent thinking), and then choose the most helpful option to take forward (convergent thinking).
- Develop: We shape and refine our idea, adding layers and removing anything extraneous.
- Implement: We take action and bring our solution to life.
Most people are drawn to certain steps in this model and have blind spots in others. For instance, I’m an Ideator and an Implementor. My mind brims over with ideas and I often leap straight from enthusiasm into implementation. Were I to slow down and clarify first before brainstorming, or to develop my idea before implementation, I might improve the speed and effectiveness of my creative process.
People of varying creative styles approach the model differently. A structured thinker is likely to be methodical through each step. An intuitive thinker may not even realize there are steps through which she is moving.
If you’re familiar with the Writerly Play rooms, you’ll likely notice that the Problem Solving Model can be carried out in each room. For instance, if you’re in the Attic, collecting, organizing and choosing material, you might clarify what you’re looking for, generate ideas around the material available, add to and refine your idea to make it more solid, and then take action by putting your idea into words and/or images. Then, you’ll take the idea into one of the other rooms such as the Studio, where your Creative Problem Solving might focus on creating a first draft.
After learning about the Creative Problem Solving Model as well as encountering some fabulous material on Productivity Styles by Carson Tate, I decided to revise my Creativity Styles Quiz. I don’t have a lab coat or a two-way mirror, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing people of all ages engaging in creative tasks. Clear patterns for creativity styles have emerged from those experiences and my continued research. What I see most often are people who switch between a couple of these styles depending on the situation. Understanding which styles fit you best will help you better understand any sticky parts of your creative process. Like me, you may discover a few blind spots. By playing to our creative styles, we can choose strategies and tools that fit us and that also help us through any part of the creative process that doesn’t come naturally.
I’m excited to share this resource with you! Here’s the link to the creative styles quiz.
by Naomi | Aug 24, 2016 | Creative Life
Creativity isn’t a superpower some people have and others don’t. Creative thinking is a habit–actually a collection of habits–developed over time. Writerly Play is a toolkit to help you understand and master those habits. Before we dive into the specifics of Writerly Play, let’s explore where this toolkit comes from and why it is necessary.
Imagine how you might learn to play the guitar.
You could pick the guitar up and strum. Practicing intuitively, you’d pick up a mix of good and bad habits as you went. Ultimately, you’d reach a plateau. It would be all too easy to believe yourself a mediocre player. You might give up, or settle for your limited skill set.
From the outside, we can see the mistaken belief and clear solution. Musicians need to learn the building blocks of their instruments. The problem isn’t that you are a poor player, but rather that you learned in the wrong way.
We need to learn the building blocks of creative thinking.
Like our guitar player, most adults have a few highly developed creative skills, counterbalanced by at least one blind spot. This blind spot is the source of much frustration. In mild cases, it can cause annoying creative blocks, but more often, we point to our blind spots–or at least the trouble caused by those blind spots–as proof that we aren’t creative, or aren’t creative enough.
To this lie, I emphatically shout, “UNTRUE!” Untapped creative energy festers. It becomes criticism, frustration, and even destructive action. On the flip side, when individuals find creative flow, families, schools, neighborhoods, and businesses are transformed.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fiercely pursuing this question: How can I unlock more of my creativity? I’m not one to moon around wishing I were more creative without taking action. Whenever I feel that pang of jealousy–you know the one, it invariably strikes when we see a seeming genius–I ask myself, “What are they doing that makes them creative?”
I set out to understand what creative people do.
Throughout my life, I’ve trained as an actress, a musician, a dancer, a director, a visual artist, an author, an educator and an entrepreneur. I’ve taught those subjects, as well. Teaching forced me to break art forms into respective skills. Over time, I began to see an important pattern. Each art form has its own language and key skills, but success in any medium requires mastery of a set of foundational abilities.
Creativity involves agility in these skills, as well as the flexibility to move fluidly between them. Or, put another way, highly creative people know what kind of thinking they need to be doing at different stages of the process. Those seeming geniuses move between modes of thinking intuitively. What excellent news for the rest of us! In order to develop our creativity, we simply need to build this mental toolkit and learn how to use it.
Remember our guitar player? Unlearning bad creative thinking habits usually requires a frustrating month or two. What used to come easily takes focused mental effort.
We can drill, train and use our determination to push through. Or, we can play. Games offer the opportunity to struggle, but in a way that appeals to our spontaneous, joyful spirit. That’s what Writerly Play is—a framework to help you individualize, map and problem solve your creative process. Like a choose-your-own adventure story or an improv game, it has a loose structure that invites you to come on in and play.
Before we move on, reflect on your own creative experiences.
When have you felt most successful with your creative thinking? When have you felt stuck? Do you see any patterns? Jot down your thoughts or create a small mental collection.
In part two of The Nuts and Bolts of Writerly Play, we’ll dive in and explore the specifics of Writerly Play. Then, throughout the rest of the series, we’ll play with the toolkit.
by Naomi | Dec 11, 2015 | Teaching Strategies
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Give your students opportunities to share their writing with flair. Sharing opportunities throughout our sessions and especially at the end keep motivation high. A huge motivating factor for revision is the desire to connect more effectively with our readers.
Explore more ideas and possibilities for sharing in Writerly Play: Transform Your Teaching with Game-Based Strategies and Tools.
