Small Ways to be More Creative Every Day As a Writer
As a writer and creator, I’ve always been looking for motivation.
I’ve always been a creative kid who feels misunderstood. I had a childhood where I didn’t really have any friends and faced abuse from the only friend I had (long story short: she’d hit me and scare away anyone who tried to be my friend), which set the tone for ways. found to express myself when away from him. As soon I knew how to write letters I began writing stories and illustrated them, something, when I shared with my high school writing class, was something I became bullied for. But the creativity was there from a young age, no matter the story and angle I tell it from.
As I got older and majored in business, I quickly sought out outlets and classes that didn’t meet the requirements for my major. I ended up finishing four minors in three years, and would have been able to register more if my college didn’t deem it abnormal and banned me from doing it. During that time, I learned a lot about myself and tiny tricks to be more creative in everyday life, so I thought to share them.
Keep a list of words you run across.
This completely identifies me as a writer, but when I would sit in lectures, instead of taking notes I sat down and wrote the words that stuck out to me in lectures. In college, I took exactly three writing classes: Advanced Poetry, Nonfiction, and Memoir Writing. I did the majority of my writing on my own and with outside fellowships, such as with Brooklyn Poets, and found that I was much more productive that way. Anyways, I’d end up with this large list of lecture words that didn’t make sense on their own, but when I sat down with them I made maps and outlines of how they connected.
And, usually, they ended up becoming a poem or a basis for a story. I tend to keep a lot of my word lists in bullet journals because I don’t like the structure of having lined pages. Why have lined pages? I don’t think creativity is something linear, which is why I tend to avoid things with too much structure. And, quite frankly, they bore me.
Leave your phone at home or on airplane mode.
During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson wrote 1,800 poems. That’s an incredible output for someone who didn’t live as long as people live today, and especially for someone who had never actually published poems during her lifetime. Nowadays, when you take the subway or bus somewhere new, look around. How many people around you are on their phones? Almost everyone I bet.
Phone time has been something that has eaten away a lot of my creative time. I woke up each morning and reached for my phone immediately, scrolling through Instagram for hours. It wasn’t until March 2022 I began realizing how I wanted to throw myself into my work, specifically after reading Sylvia Plath. She learned poetry and fiction by relentlessly studying the masters who came before, putting herself into her work and research.
Granted, you don’t have to be Sylvia Plath and throw yourself into this, but the concept is there. Think of how many books or words you can write in the fifteen minutes you spent scrolling Instagram. If you have your headphones in on the bus, think of how many life experiences you’ve missed witnessing. That couple fighting in the corner? A woman sobbing in the corner? There are so many stories, beautiful ones, right before your eyes.
Watch a movie and write down the words that strike you.
This ties into my very first bullet point in this post. Movies have been such a great source of inspiration for me. I think there’s something so innovative in forms of cinema, as well as how we think it imitates life. Cinema is tricky in the way that we see it often as a replica of reality unless there’s been some sort of unspoken agreement saying otherwise (e.g. being a science fiction film immediately distinguishes as the other). We take it for a small nugget of reality, but even documentaries can be constructed and framed, and when something is filmed, it immediately no longer is the present moment.
I think there’s so much to learn from these concepts in writing, and by writing down what catches your eye during a movie can help tease out the themes that interest you most. How can you learn from cinema? How can you use it as inspiration? For me it teaches me structure and form, what I can and cannot do in my own work, but I imagine for someone else it teaches story blocking. You won’t ever know how it inspires you until you sit down and try this specific form of creativity.
Browse online art collections.
My favorite art museums to look through are the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Like cinema, I find that there is so much to learn from looking at art. Ekphrastic writing, especially poetry, is such a big form that is taught nowadays. When you’re in a creative rut, it can be inspiring to explore other mediums.
I found myself stuck in a genre (poetry) once, but when I started working in theatre and spending more time making different arts, it all become so much more interconnected for me. By exploring other mediums, you can realize that creativity doesn’t have to be limited in one space and allows you the chance to have permission to branch out.
Here’s one of my favorite MoMA exhibits that I’ve seen to get you started. It was about the early history of photography and movement—what would later become film. It was so beautiful and I spent a very long time staring at this painting specifically. I took a lot of notes, went home, and, a week later, wrote some poems about those thoughts I had while there.
