Real Words

As a writer, I read voraciously. I consume the written word on a daily basis. Although I explore all genres and all types of books, it has become important to me this year to specifically focus on finding and enjoying more books that are specifically about creativity.

There are many different types of these books. There are lengthy academic books on the creative brain and the creative process. There are tips for being more creative in your daily life. And there are books at every level of the spectrum in between those two ends. They are all valuable for providing writers (and other artists) with new ways of looking at their work - and their lives.

One of the books that I picked up this week is Unleash Your Creativity (52 Brilliant Ideas): Fresh Ideas for Having Fresh Ideas. This is similar in many ways to “writing prompt” books but also provides additional information and ideas that makes it a little bit more than this. Like those books, it offers lessons and suggestions can be done in bite-sized pieces in order to jumpstart your creativity. However, it also provides a description of a certain facet of the artistic life, information on challenges that you might face in this area and tips for taking the “prompt” further if you want to.

For example, Tip #23 is “Play Your Part” which suggests that you do some role-playing to embody the character that you are trying to write about. It describes why this is good, why you might want to do it and what role-playing really means. It gives suggestions for doing this at different levels of subtlety so that it can be incorporated easily into your real life. (Such as reacting differently in a business meeting than you normally would or simply considering how you would react differently if you were another race or gender than you are.) It provides a specific exercise, a related quote, and direction to another part of the book for a related tip that can expand on role-playing. It also provides two challenges that people doing this exercise might face and resolutions to those challenges. And it does all of this in five pages.

The tips are easy to complete and have the potential to jar you into new creative action. The book can be picked up and turned to any page so that you don’t have to do the exercises in any sort of order. Each one links to another one in the book so that you can see your creativity developing and connecting back to itself. It’s the kind of book that you don’t read at one time but read regularly throughout your creative life.

Question of the Day: What other writing prompt or writing exercise books do you recommend?

[Tags] writing, creativity, reading, bevan, prompts, writing exercise [/Tags]