Creativity Calisthenics: Ways to Limber Up Your Creativity

Most of us have exercises in a variety of ways--jumping jacks, yoga, chasing our naked toddlers around the house when they break free after a bath (or is that just me?), but have you done many exercises for your creativity?

How many times have you said or heard, I used to be creative when I was a kid? Well, actually, you still are, you just have allowed that "muscle" in your brain to atrophy a bit. Here are some way to limber up your creativity and get it flowing again.

First off, creativity is just the recombination of known facts in unusual order. The reason kids appear to be more creative is because they don't know or ignore the order of things and mix it all up in their play-- a wooden spoon can be a speaker, you can travel to the moon with cardboard box and a boa, and there's no reason a stuffed hippo can't marry a human princess doll.

So, let's get started.

1. Randomly select five words from a book. Be quick about it, then throw them together in a song as quick as you can!

viejo
sauce
Slinky
rooted
truth

Thank you, Gary Soto for CANTO FAMILIAR and these great words.

Timer on, here's my song:

Oh, oh, it won't go, my slinky's rooted in my sauce,
oh, oh, veijo
This is growing old
I think my Slinky's growing mold
oh, oh, viejo
Time go!

55 seconds.

Okay, now tell a story.

Never play with your slinky on your abuela's front porch. Why? Because if you do, you might get called away for a game of soceer in her by her neighbor Hector, you abuela will come out of her house in her roller blades, catch the Slinky on her way down the steps, try to pull it off, then go careening down the sidewalk, snaring the cat,and swinging around the light post on the corner to go knees first into the row of trash cans on Fifth Ave and you'll have to spend the afternoon cleaning trash off the sidewalk.

2 min 8 seconds.

Now beat my times! Go on, you can do it!
Share your work.

2. Choose a poem, a short story, a song, and reply to it in the same genre or another.

Here's a short poem by Margaret Atwood:

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

a link to the poem

Phew! Am I glad I never met that guy. Or was it a girl, you didn't say, but I know how it goes, you meet someone at a party, or in a coffee shop and you think, Click, click, click, this is the one for me. Like that fella, let's just call him Hamish, who pumped into me in line at The Brewery last week. As I wiped chai latte off my shirt, he actually said, "I think that's a good color for you, it matches your skin tone."
I should've run, right. Or asked him to replace the shirt with the color of his choice, but no, I laughed. we sat down and talked, talked, talked about ...him--what book he's reading, what he did last weekend--hiking and birdwatching--how he is poised to be the lead in the Mixed Blood Theater production of The Dutchman (he's Jewish, so that would be a show to watch). He was true to my renaming all right. A real Ham. Had I been paying attention, I would've said no instead of making a date to see him, waiting at an empty table for an hour before getting tickets to the opening night for a forgetful maitre d'. That'll show me not to get hook in by a guy's line.

You can also do this with a painting.

Just let the first work get you started.

3. Sit down, write the first ten words that come to you. Write a poem, song, or paragraph from a piece of fiction as fast as you can, then choose 10 words from that piece to start another and so on. Anything to get your juices flowing. Here, let me give it a try.

Spoon
table top lazy susan
phone
cap
book
lint
rope
bell
rose
hip

Spin, Scrabble, scramble,
as I turn the lazy susan and watch the words whirl,
wishing the phone would ring
instead my eyes are listing over the book
in my hand as my head longs to hear
the bell tone of my ring
laundry lint makes a lousy rope as I sit
waiting for the phone to ring
tossing bottle caps at the hip of the cat
statue on my desk
Instead of a call, I get your roses
with two tickets to the zoo
I think I'll
make you wait at the gate

Whoever designed those whirling turnstyle gates you see at the zoo and getting into the subway owes me thousands in chiropractor bills. I swear I push out my hip because of those damn things. It doesn't help that I have to book it from my internship in the marine animal lab to make it to my paying job at the diner on 53rd Street four days a week. 4 Aleve later I'm ready to head off to night class. If I don't land the job at the zoo after all this, I think I'm going to move to Maine and work for a fish hatchery.

Well, I've offered just a few creativity exercises that should be helpful, I hope. If you have exercises of your own to share, please do.

But keep in mind, your creativity is like everything else--use it or loose it!