Community Skill-share: Let's Make a Creativity Toolkit
The Forever Workshop Community Corner
Ahoy there, lovely writerpeople.
We’re coming to the end of another brilliant workshopping month and there are some excellent tips ‘n’ tricks to be found in Erin Karbuczky‘s Lessons from Taylor Swift’s Creative Process’ series, so if you haven’t taken a look already, you’ve got so much yet to enjoy!
(FYI you don’t need to have listened to a single Taylor Swift song to benefit from the goldmine of advice and insight Erin brings to her lessons.)
And while we’re on the subject of The Creative Process, we thought it’d be cool to open up the Community Corner this week for a little skill-sharing.
Share your best creative ‘productivity’ hacks!
What I like best about Erin’s workshops is how she reframes the idea of productivity into a building a personalised, practical toolkit for the creative process.
For example:
How do you work best?
What inspires you?
What themes interest you?
How do you organise your work/thoughts?
What motivates you to write?
How do you learn?
What’s your writing ‘ritual’ or routine?
Now, what works for one writer might not work for the next, of course. BUT if we get enough writerly brains together, there’s sure to be a huge range of interesting ideas and approaches that we can ALL benefit from. Perhaps even some new ways of approaching writing you haven’t considered before…
So let’s share our top three creative tips and create a gigantic pick ‘n’ mix menu in the comments — the weirder the better!
To get you started, here are the tricks that are working for me at the moment:
Voicenotes! Talk out your writing problem in a voicenote, vent your frustrations, float ideas, or just reiterate your plan. Something about saying it out loud makes the cogs turn better for me. Then you can listen back and write up the useful bits later.
Change the font! Seems really silly, but something about changing the appearance of a text I’ve been staring at forever helps me view it anew. Same goes with page colour — I like a minty green or sepia for easing eye-strain.
Take a dance break! Thoughts getting muddy? Doom scrolling? Writing thoroughly blocked? Whack on some music and dance like it’s the last day of Woodstock for at least three songs and I promise you’ll at least feel a bit less blehhh.
Alright, now it’s your turn:
What three things help YOUR creative process the most?
Let us know in the comments, and browse the other answers to find your next favourite creative hack!
Sneak peek for next week: a super extra special AMA!
Oh hey, one last thing.
Since we have a spare week between Erin’s workshop and the next (which just so happens to be Take it From Shakespeare with yours truly), we thought we’d do something a little different.
To celebrate the first quarter of The Forever Workshop’s schedule, we’ve invited our wonderful workshop authors back to join in with a special week-long Ask Us Anything, covering all the subjects you’ve workshopped so far (along with a few extra topics, just for kicks).
So look out for the AMA post on Monday 31 March and get your questions ready for Lauren, Nina, Erin, Shelby and me!
(P.S. This one will be for paid subscribers only, so if you haven’t already, upgrade before Monday to join in!)
love "change the font!" such a simple trick but it works!
1) Focus on the emotion. I am obsessed with emotions and really seeing and feeling them. How does it feel for me to write this scene? How do the characters feel? How will the reader feel? Feeling, feeling, feeling. Too often we get stuck in craft rules like grammar, vocabulary, yada, yada, yada. But those are merely tools to get to real emotion. Sometimes it's easier to skip all that and just dive straight in to the emotional deep end. Keeping my mind on the emotion also keeps me excited and engaged with the work. It's also, perhaps, an answer to that Zen koan: "You can do it if you can do it."
2) Childlike questions. When I am grasping for ideas, it helps me to go back to a childlike mindset: why are people mean? why do we have pets? where do we go when we die? These questions become themes that then become ideas for stories.
3) Drugs. Once in a (different) forum, the question of which substances help with writing came up. I couldn't imagine sitting in front of my tablet and banging out a thousand words while drunk, or high, or ??? But writers do it, some of them (in)famous. But just before I hit send to share the observation, my morning routine flashed before my eyes. So. Much. Coffee. So yeah, drugs, although I guess be selective about which. YMMV.