[-quick tip, practice-]

A Quick Creative Practice
~simple habits can have profound impacts~

“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us…..” Marcel Proust, French writer.

Whether you’re on a high energy creative roll or in a loggy slump, paying attention to your senses always makes good sense.

The kind of creativity you’re engaged in will tend to dictate the sense organ that you primarily use—though sight wins hands down. Music - hearing, Photography - sight, Cooking - taste, Pottery/Sculpting - touch and what about that OTHER one? Ah, yes, smell!

Since that’s the sense that tends to be used least, try going on a smell adventure for a way to inspire, to perk up your creative juices. As I have detailed recently, cooking that is done with intention, can be a great creative catalyst for this very reason.

Cook something that has smells you really love—or hate! Even if you don’t, cook you can make lemonade, cocoa, peppermint tea. Or just bite into and eat one perfect peach, making sure that you are aware of the smell as you do it. There are smells all around us all the time, right? Paying attention to them is the key.

Smells can be a switch, a direct neurological link to a memory, a feeling, a moment in time. It’s simple and effective. Researchers believe that this feeling of directness to a smell or taste induced memory has to do with the fact that these senses are our only chemical ones.

Sense memories are most often associated with the art of acting, but they are also intimately tied with writing, music and art as well. We create out of who we are, so what could be better than to use this primitive, chemical-sense to heighten our abilities in order to create our own truth?

After exposing yourself to the smells of your choice, try doing a ten-minute writing exercise or quick sketches. Use the mental stimulation to create something just from the sense of smell. Have fun!

Here’s an excellent article on the science behind the sense of smell and memory.

[-warm-up, drawing-]

Here’s a creative warm-up exercise that uses categories.

Choose a category each day to draw in your journal. Divide your paper into 8 - 12 small sections. Decide on the length of time you want to devote to this. My suggestion is to start with no more than ten minutes. Quicker sketches will loosen you up. Later on, you may want to devote more time to the sketches.

Draw a version of your chosen category in each of the sections.

The idea is to warm-up your creative brain by doing quick, non-threatening, simple drawings. Doing a lot of drawings of one thing helps you explore your visual knowledge of that category. You will find that you’re going to learn a lot about yourself, your visual memory, your ability to express a simple thing quickly and you’ll find yourself being more observant of that category once you’ve done the exercise.

Here’s my “Fruit” category page:
As you see, this isn’t great art. They are quick simple, even iconic sketches. And yet, I found out a lot from doing them.

I found out quickly that to distinguish between a drawing of an apple, a peach, a plum and even a lemon is tricky, but can be done. I found out that though I have removed plenty of them, I couldn’t, when I started, remember what the stem of a pineapple looks like. I found out that in order to make a peach look like a peach, you have to turn your pencil on its side to get a softer edge. I remembered that the skin of a lemon is pitted and that’s a bit of a different pencil mark that the tiny seeds of a strawberry. I found out that in order to sketch a bunch of grapes, it’s easier (and more fun) to sketch the dark, negative spaces that just draw the overlapping grapes. I found that sometimes a fruit is best depicted by the drippy, wetness that ends up on the surface below it. I found out that it was hard for me to come up with twelve fruits and that I didn’t seem to have a clue what shape a fig is.

Try it. It’s fun and you’ll be amazed how much it will stretch you.

Here’s a list to get you going:

I threw in the last three to remind you that these don’t have to be solid objects. But stick with the simpler ones at first. See what happens. After doing these for a while, revisit a category so you can see how the first sketches compare with ones you do after sensitizing yourself to this process and to thinking visually.

And, let us know what you learned by doing this exercise!

[-quick tip, practice-]

A Quick Creative Practice
~simple habits can have profound impacts~

Keep a tablet and a pen or pencil on your bedside table at all times!

DREAMS
If you wake with a dream still in reach, jot it down immediately. If you want to fall back to sleep, don’t worry about transcribing the full dream. If you write the most important words and images you’re likely to remember the connecting links later.

SOLUTIONS
Those transitional times just before falling asleep or waking—especially from a nap—are rich times for problem-solving and inspirational ideas. Having paper and pencil nearby will allow you to capture these gems that might otherwise disappear from your mind as the world crowds in.

SKETCHES
The tablet isn’t just for words. If you’re like me, you’ll sometimes *see* images that need to be painted or drawn. Make quick sketches before they too are lost to time.

[-writing, exercise-]

Writing takes activity. You have to write the words down on the page. Everyone knows that. But what’s going on inside as you make that effort to put a story together? Think about the issue of control and how it does or doesn’t work for you. We tend to think of energy, activity, the doing part of it as the most important. But consider another viewpoint. Here’s what Brenda Ueland says about it:

Willing is doing something you know already, something you have been told by somebody else; there is no new imaginative understanding in it. And presently your soul gets frightfully sterile and dry because you are so quick, snappy and efficient about doing one thing after another that you have not time for your own ideas to come in and develop and gently shine.

In this spirit, here’s a daydreaming exercise to foster the idea of letting go so that you can dream something up rather than just jotting something down.

Sit in front of your computer. Look at the keyboard for a few moments. Put your fingers on the keys and type a sentence. Type ANYTHING.
For example:

your thoughts:
• I am typing a sentence.
• This is a stupid exercise.
• I hate this.
• What am I doing this for?

whatever comes into your head, no matter how weird:

• Dogs with feathers would create nests in their sleep.
• Wallpaper hides cracks and peels when it’s old.
• My teeth might crumble before I die.

the most random nonsense you can come up with:
• Jumbled crossover blinks always allay floods.
• Accessing liverwurst can be the answer to pink socks.
• Everyone jousts because the ghostly phone didn’t ring.

Now here’s the hard part. As soon as you’ve put the period on your sentence, delete it.

As fast as you can, type something else.

Delete that.

Keep doing it for at least ten minutes, more if you can tolerate it.

Now begin your writing for the day.

This exercise does three important things:

1. It loosens your mind by making flighty associations and spurring imaginative juxtapositions on the page
2. It clears the mind of the top layer of dry, tired dirt so that the underlying fertile soil is available to you
3. It provides practice in letting go of words.
   This is a valuable lesson for a writer because we all tend to love what comes out of us. Our words are our babies and we don’t like to make them disappear once they are on the paper. But we have to know how as well as when to delete. This will help.

[-r-mindfulness, exercise-]

by Nancy Waldman

Before beginning your creative work for the day, try this as a warm-up. It is an excellent way to access your R-mind and to lift your awareness from everyday mode into a heightened realm.

This warm-up is a drawing exercise but it’s not just for visual artists. It will help no matter what kind of creative endeavor follows.

Pick an object to draw. It can be anything, simple or complicated but, especially if you are new to this, choose a small object that can be brought to your drawing table so that you can focus on it easily.

Try to set aside ten to twenty minutes of uninterrupted time. Set a timer if you have one. Because you know there’s a set limit, this will help you to ‘forget’ the passage of time as you work. This will enhance the experience.

Using paper and pencil (it doesn’t have to be a pencil, but I enjoy the resistance that graphite on paper gives) you are going to draw the object. But this is no ordinary drawing. A contour drawing is one where your eyes never leave the object you are drawing and your pencil never leaves the paper once you’ve begun.

The end result will not look like the object you’ve chosen. This is okay because the purpose of this contour drawing is not to have a representation of that object; it is instead to focus on the edges, the lines, the boundaries, the negative space, the contours of the object in a new way. Here is a contour drawing I did of my hand.

The first thing you probably notice is that it doesn’t look like a hand. Good. It’s not supposed to. Now, notice the very specific quality of the line. In contour drawings, you are focused only on *seeing* and moving the pencil as you move the eye. Usually, there is another step between putting what we see on paper. Normally, you would look at the object, then look at the paper, decide on the placement of the line and begin to draw. By that time, though, the specific quality of what you’ve seen has already become somewhat diluted.

In a contour drawing, because the usual connection between what is being seen and what is going down on the paper is removed, the lines show the specificity. They are usually quite beautiful and sensitive, but even that is not the purpose of doing the drawing.

The purpose is to get your brain away from its usual mind-set. After you do your drawing, ask yourself how it felt. Did you notice that you were a little irritated at first? Perhaps you felt frustrated or silly. All of these less than positive responses are quite normal ones, especially if you’ve never done a contour drawing before.

That’s your everyday mind rebelling against an exercise that is completely different. The goal here is to persist with the drawing long enough to pass through these objections and into another mode, a different way of thinking.

Once you’ve done the drawing, then start your day of novel writing or oil painting or composing or whatever your creative work happens to be. You’ll find yourself in a less mundane, more relaxed, focussed and flexibly creative state of mind.

[-photo essay & interview-]

Some collections happen because we are engaged in creative practices that require materials. The more we create, the more we love our materials, the more we need and want to acquire more. Often we acquire so many that we couldn’t possibly use all that we’ve gathered. The materials themselves becomes a collection. Here we have an interview with and photographs of the studios of Teesha Moore, founder of artfest and artFIBERfest.

Read the rest of this entry »

[-essay, poetry-]

What makes good poetry is a bit of a mystery to many of us. This chocked-full of tips article can help you make yours good enough to publish.

by guest contributor, Mary Diane Hausman

Are you ready to abandon your poems? Before you toss your newest poem away, revisit it using some exercises that have proven helpful to poets who are feeling “stuck.” If you explore some of these ideas, you may be steps closer to placing your poetry in a well-known literary journal.

You can make submissions on your own, or hire some help. Every poem, on average, must be submitted to 100 markets before it is accepted. For poets, these numbers are sad, but true. Even the best poems must cover a lot of territory before they appear on the printed page. A reputable author’s submission service may offer you more time to write while they take care of the submissions. Remember that a good submission service screens potential writers for quality work. They don’t take everyone.

When writing poetry, a poet considers language. They also consider form, and may even consider audience. But that is not all. Though form serves as a vehicle or container, and audience can help drive a poem; and while it is language that gives voice to poetry, it is basically the root of the poet—the poet’s experience—that gives voice to the voice. Even when poetry does not reflect the poet’s direct experience, it is still filtered through her or his eyes. Both poem and poet are inextricably connected; one cannot exist without the other. The material from which the poet culls the poem is that which has been sown, tilled, pulled, dumped, dredged, fermented, stored, and often kept hidden all the poet’s life. If the poet feels brave enough, or even if she is terrified beyond belief, she will excavate this treasure and use it to lay a foundation. Foundation laid, the poet then uses language to form the structure, build the ramparts which hold the poem together. Having built the poem with the blood and bone and truth of her, the poet thus offers a monument that withstands even the critic’s wind. Or, at least the storm of self-doubt.

Following are some simple ideas for exploring poetry and using your own experience to create a poem. If you’d like in-depth technical information on form and poetry structure, there is a brief list of recommended books at the end of this article.

* Practice using your voice by writing a poem about a life experience, a memory, a desire, or a belief.

* Write a poem about your name. You may do this in either a positive or negative light—whatever is meaningful to you. You may even pick a name you like and write a poem about that name, making it your own.

* Select a poem written by someone else; write your version of the poem.

* Select two poems by different poets which contain the same theme. Write a couple of paragraphs comparing the poems.

* In your own words explain what you think makes a “good” poem.

* Pick a topic you dislike and write a poem about it.

* Try writing song lyrics. Compare your lyrics to a poem you’ve written.

* Read some material on different structures of poetry (iambic pentameter, rhyme, sonnet, etc.). Write a poem with the same theme in each specific structure. Pick at least three different structures.

* Write a poem explaining poetic rhythm.

* Explore and write examples of lyric and narrative poetry.

Some books on poetry worth owning:

* A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
* In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
* How to Interpret Poetry by Laurie E. Rozakis
* The Poetry Dictionary by John Drury

Exploring the ideas listed above may help open new doors for your writing. In addition to your poems being well crafted, they must be submitted regularly and extensively. Beat the odds with strong writing COMBINED with a powerful and tenacious submission strategy.

© 2005 - 2007 Mary Diane Hausman

About The Author: Mary Diane Hausman was born and raised in the Texas Hill Country, and that experience provides a strong voice for her work. Her work appears with Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove in the anthology, Unsilenced: The Spirit of Women (Commune-a-Key Press), as well as in numerous other anthologies and literary journals, including: Primavera, Inkwell, New Texas, My Lover Is A Woman and Pillow Talk (Ballantine Books and Alyson Books), The MacGuffin, The Texas Review, Out of the Dark. She teaches college level creative writing and poetry as well as public workshops. She has utilized Writer’s Relief Inc., an Author’s Submission Service, for ten years which frees her time to write. For more information, visit their web site at http://www.wrelief.com. Click here for more articles by the author.

Published by permission of the author in the July 2005 issue of The Practically Creative Quarterly, theme: space and spaces

[-quick tip-]

A Quick Creative Practice
~simple habits can have profound impacts~

Inspiration Log

Keep a journal or notebook log for your projects. Always write down a sentence or phrase about what inspired you to begin. Once you get in the middle of the work, it’s easy to go off on a tangent or get bogged down. It can be helpful to look back at that initial inspiration to either get back on track or make a decision about where you want to go that is different from your initial idea.

Originally published in the July 2005 issue of The Practically Creative Quarterly, theme: space and spaces

[-art, tutorial-]

Here’s a drawing tutorial for anyone who’s ever actually uttered the words, “I can’t draw a straight line” as well as for others who know they can, but who are out of practice.

HOW TO DRAW

by Nancy S.M. Waldman

Becoming aware of Negative Space will help you to be able to beautifully reproduce anything you can see.

What exactly IS Negative Space? The easiest way to think of it is the space around whatever solid object you’re trying to draw. Here’s an example. In the photo on the right we’ve pointed out some of the negative spaces.

See the spaces between the back rungs (the yellow arrows)? That is negative space. The spaces in-between the rungs at the bottom of the chair (green arrows) is also negative space. Around the edges of the photograph - outlined in purple - you can see that the total space around the chair is also negative space. Seeing it in a photograph is easier than if the chair were sitting in your room. Then, you would have to imagine the edges of your paper as the outer edge of the negative space around the chair. See below for a hint about how to make this easier.

Notice that each one of those negative spaces has a specific shape. This is what you would need to tune into if you were going to draw this particular chair in this particular position. Does this feel too complicated?

Here’s another example. The second photo has some of the negative spaces outlined. Anything you can see that isn’t candle or candlestick is negative space.

Now look what happens when we put the candlestick in a more natural setting. What you notice immediately is that the background is more complicated and one object overlaps another. That is precisely why paying attention to the space around objects is so important.In drawing what we see, we must overcome the part of our mind - the L-mode - that tells us “this is too hard!” Entering into a state of R-mindfulness will help to stop thinking about how we aren’t up to the task and will, instead, allow our eyes to take in what is actually in front of us and translate those lines, edges, shadows and colours to our paper.

When we SEE the space around what we’re drawing, the 3-dimensional picture in front of us flattens out.
Take a look at the candlestick still life again.
Some of the negative spaces are outlined so that you can see them more easily.
Look at the curved space showing through the back of the chair (outlined in purple). If you began there and drew that space, then allowed your eye to travel to the next space - say the space that is made by the edges of the window, chair rungs and table just below the curved space (outlined in yellow) and so on to the next and the next space without worrying too much about how it was turning out, you would be doing several important things at once.

First, you would be paying attention - truly seeing - what’s in front of you rather than thinking, “There’s too much! What do I draw first? How do I show that light edge? I can’t do this!” — all of which would be worse than useless to what you’re trying to do. Getting away from L-mode wordiness is an important step.

Second, you would be transcending your L-mode and getting into your R-mode, the creatively friendly part of your mind.
The reason this happens is that the L-mode is confused by paying attention to what isn’t there. When the L-mode gets frustrated that’s a clue to you that your R-mode can kick in. Once you become familiar with that frustrated feeling, you’ll begin to welcome it - it means you’re on the right track!

Third, you would be seeing what’s in front of you in a new way… more as puzzle pieces than as objects with 3-dimensions. In order to draw what you see, it’s necessary to flatten out the picture.

In this way, it is actually easier to draw a complicated picture with many overlapping details - such as the second candlestick still life. The candlestick with the white background has such a large negative space in comparison to the object that it’s easier to lose your way than it is with the smaller negative spaces of the second candlestick. Here’s something very complicated for you to imagine drawing:

Can you begin to see the negative spaces? Remember from our candlestick example that the seemingly more complicated scene became easy when we looked for the spaces around the objects and thought of them as puzzle pieces. Let’s move in closer to the plant so you can see that the same principle applies.

Look at the beautiful negative spaces! When drawing something this complicated, an artist does make decisions about what details can be left out.
You can do a magnificent drawing of a complex subject like this without drawing every single leaf or space. However, what never works is to allow your L-mode brain to instruct you while you’re drawing as to what a Swedish Ivy looks like. If you do, the end result will not look like the plant in front of you. It will look generic at best.

In order to draw faces, people, plants, hands, landscapes, interiors, trees - in fact anything you can see - using negative space will make you believe in your own artistic talent! Of course there are other skills in learning how to draw what you see but learning to use Negative Space is an essential tool to have under your belt. Have fun!
Picturing Frames

Make yourself a picture frame in order to envision the edge of your drawing and see the negative space more easily. Out of stiff piece of 8″ X 10″ cardboard, cut a rectangle out of the center, leaving a 1″ to 2″ frame. There’s no magic to the size of the opening.
In fact, try two, one with a 5″ X 6″ opening and another with a 4″ X 5″ opening. Hold them up to the scene that you want to draw in order to picture those outer edges of your negative space. This is also a great tool for getting the best composition before you begin.

© 2005 - 2007 nancy sm waldman; all rights reserved

Originally published in the July 2005 issue of The Practically Creative Quarterly, theme: space and spaces