Tag: creativity

When trying to build a daily writing habit, setting creative constraints can immensely help in your game. When I’ve challenged myself to write every day for one year, privately, and then to publish for 30 days, publicly, I’ve found helpful the strategic use of limitations.

Set the creative constraints to write no more than 250 words. Or 500 words. Or to write for at least 30 minutes and no more than one hour.

Define the template for your article. Think about the usual storytelling format: introduction (stating the context), development (raising attention on one issue, proposing solutions), conclusion (wrapping up with observations).

The 1-2-3 format is what I’ve used at least 30 times in my challenge, Shipping 30 Atomic Essays for 30 days.

While I’ve rejected the screenshot format because highly inaccessible and unusable, I come up with a three-parts (plus the title) format that I’ve immediately found workable:

• Clear and concise title giving a direct direction
• Introduction. The writing challenge’s broader context and one sentence summarizing the issue as if it were a subtitle.
• Development. Treatment of the topic with a logical and incremental progression in supporting the initial statement. Sometimes it’s a short story, and others are a list of examples, evidence, or applications.
• Conclusion. Further reinforcement of the initial statement, reworded with an effort to build a punch line closing in a crescendo.

Having a format to follow, even when flexible and loose, gives the quick sprint of taking care of the topic without worrying about the structure. It gives pace and logical flow. When you get fluid with the format, you can become very efficient in writing 200-300 words in less than 30 minutes.

And when you look at what you wrote in that nicely formatted article, with exact steps in your narration, going from a punchy title, an immersive introduction, an engaging development to an impactful conclusion, you feel good.

What should I write now?

If you find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to write, you can leverage on your drafts, your notes, or your creative toolbox.

Why don’t you know what to write? Haven’t you been writing a free-flowing draft every day? No? That’s the first problem. If you build a habit of writing every day by transcribing your thoughts, you won’t have an ideas shortage. It’s easy and comfortable, and it’s packaged creativity. You don’t even have to think. Look into your draft archive or even your Zettelkasten, if you know what it is, and randomly pick one piece of writing.

Don’t you like it? Well, my friend, we’re here because you don’t know what to write. Don’t you think you’re pushing a bit too much? Trust the system. You’re cashing-in your investment, pick a draft, revise it, and publish it. That’s it.

Oh, I get it. You have no drafts in your archive. Well, that will require a bit of extra work, but we can fix it as well. So, go and pick the first creative prompt from your writing tools archive. What? Don’t you have such a thing? OK. So let’s create it now.

Ready?

Write ten questions in 60 seconds. Yeah, one minute, no second thoughts, no waiting, just set a timer and go!

1. What did you do today?
2. What caught your attention?
3. What’s the most fun thing somebody told you?
4. What did you dream last night?
5. What would you like to be in one year?
6. Who do you want to meet in 10 years?
7. Who changed your life, and you never told them?
8. If you had all the money in the world, what would you do?
9. What great mind of the past would you like to talk to?
10. What’s the last thought you want to think before you die?

Done? See? Was it easy?

OK, now let’s get back to the initial problems: we have no drafts in our archive and no creative prompts. What do you say? Do we have them? Oh, right! We just wrote the two things.

• An article about what to write when you don’t have any ideas
• An initial toolbox of creative writing prompts to jumpstart your drafts

Well, thank you for pointing me at those. So, what’s next? Nothing! We did it.

Congratulations, my friend. Come back again, any time!

I did too much. And I did nothing. This is the story of how being a perfectionist got me stuck. (Photo by John T on Unsplash)

Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision.

The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge

Writing every day is my most powerful creative tool.

Every day? You could ask.

How come you are writing every day and you publish on your blog every week? You could add.

And how come your latest article was in April? We’re almost in June. You could infer.

Yeah, I have excuses. So many I could fill you with them.

I wouldn’t even need all of my excuses, I could just mention the pandemic.

You know, that insignificant event taking over the world, recently?

But the truth is another.

Perfectionism.

This killed my publishing schedule.

While, when I write in my personal diary, I flow like oil. I can write from 1’000 to 5’000 words per hour. I’ve reached 250 days of continuous writing for 350’000 words. I can go on and on. I frequently reflect on my work (no, not necessary on why I am not blogging). I think aloud to better form some thoughts. It’s working in understanding better. Who? Me.

And, frequently, I talk (to myself) about those complex and abstract concepts that float in my mind. Day and night.

Which ones? I can hear you say.

Come on, the usual ones: UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, Design Systems, management, leadership, Organization Design, parenting, sustainability, Systems Thinking, complexity, emergence, feedback loops, causal diagrams, unintended consequences, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Systems Change, social innovation, facilitation, teaching, training, learning, consciousness, the mind, space, writing, thinking, publishing, building an audience, writing the next article, and some other 357 things.

Writing the next article. Yes. Let’s talk about this for a moment.

I’ve been “writing the next article” for more than a month, now.

It’s the next episode of the “OsservAgro” saga. It was one of the most stimulating experiences I had in 2019. I have a mountain of notes and ideas about it. And I committed to myself to tell its story. My experience. How I did it. What I’ve learned. What we did together. What we could do.

But I wanted to be a historian. I wanted to tell exactly what happened, who said what, what I replied, what I thought, what I did, and what we achieved at the end.

That is not an excellent way to summarize an experience. I am afraid.
The more I recalled about the first workshop I facilitated, the more I wrote.
The more I wrote, the more details I recalled.
The more I wrote the more ideas, facilitation methods, tricks, reflections came to my mind.
And the more I wrote.
So, after a month, what was a 1’000 thousand-words essay is now 5’000.

And I feel exhausted. And nausea comes to me if I reopen the third draft. I don’t want to publish it. It’s too long. It’s not flowing. And, the worst thing, I feel it’s… incomplete.

That is exactly where I am now. In the meantime, I’ve collected (just about) 1 extra million ideas. More drafts, more articles waiting to be written. The idea of creating a “digital mind garden” came to my mind because now it seems to be fashionable.

I’ve been dreaming about creating my Memex, my Wiki, my Second Digital Brain, since 1982. Not happy with being stuck, I did it. Now.

I am doing everything now. So, I am doing nothing. This is the truth. This is where I am. And this is what I am publishing now.

Will this writing help me? I’ve written it in 17 minutes, in one shot. I was “in the flow”. I reread it only once. I made only a few corrections.

Will I get unstuck? Am I getting unstuck?