Today’s Take Action Prompt: Eavesdropping
By Sandra Lee Schubert | July 2, 2008
Eavesdropping: We hear snippets of conversation all the time. Cell phones have given us many opportunities to overhear the personal intimate details of perfect strangers. Don’t get mad. Get creative. Use some of the overheard conversations as the foundation for some juicy writing. Go take the mundane and make it brilliant with the stroke of your pen.
Record your own voice: Use a tape recorder, the computer, or a video camera and record some poetry or prose. Do you like how you sound? What don’t you like? Use your voice as an instrument, modulating it up and down. Try acting act different characters. Create a story out of the sound of your voice.
Listen: Just listen.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Today’s Take Action Prompt: Explore the World Through Touch.
By Sandra Lee Schubert | June 25, 2008
Explore the world through touch. Take objects with different textures. As example; pick an orange, a piece of velvet, sandpaper and a doll. Close your eyes and pick each object up. What are the sensations? What emotions do you feel? What images are invoked?
Write a story or poem about the images, sensations and emotions that you discovered while holding each object.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Today’s Take Action Prompt: What’s that smell?
By Sandra Lee Schubert | June 18, 2008
What’s that smell? In keeping with the theme of exploring our senses this year, I ask that you activate your sense of smell. Spring is a delightful time, offering us new scents with new flowers, spring rains and longer nights. Our sense of smell can activate all sorts of memories. Homeowners selling their homes will burn candles that smell of cinnamon and vanilla. They will bake cookies to entice buyers to believing this is a home they could live in. Think how your sense of smell activates your creative senses. Does the smell of ink or paint lead you to pick up a pen or brush? Pay attention to the things you smell. Hold an orange. Feel the texture of its skin. Run your nail across it and sniff. Sniff a day. Spend a day sniffing. Sniff the air, the food you eat. What smells are good and which ones are bad? Does a certain smell invoke a particular memory? Write about something about scents and smells. This can be an exercise into the exotic smelling is a good thing. After all, your nose knows. Use it well!
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Today’s Take Action Prompt: Experience the World Without Sense
By Sandra Lee Schubert | June 11, 2008
Take it away for 15 minutes. In a safe place or with the help of a friend blindfold yourself. Experience the world without this sense. How do your other senses come into play? Do you rely on one more then the other? Walk around and touch things. Sniff the air. Use your ears. How do things sound when you can’t see? If you have an escort, try to walk around outside and feel the air, and the sounds of the world.
What did you learn? Did you hear, taste or smell differently? How do things look now that have your sight back?
Practice seeing…
Find five things a day that are different. As an example, go to work and look at your normal environment. Look at the ordinary things and then find the extra-ordinary things. What does the ceiling look like? What is the color of the walls?
Create a story using your new sight. Add as many visuals from your everyday life as you can. Have the story be as visual as you can make it.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Today’s Take Action Prompt: Spiritual Autobiography
By Sandra Lee Schubert | June 4, 2008
Spiritual Autobiography: What are your spiritual beliefs? Are you a new age kind of person or were you raised in a traditional religion. Either way you have experiences to relate. Spend some time describing your spiritual life. What does your family belief? Do you follow those beliefs or have you discovered your own? Begin at the beginning and describe your spiritual life and how it informs your secular life.
Read some different traditions: As an example… if you are not traditional, pick up some texts you might not normally read. Is there any thing you have learned?
Write you own spiritual essay: Pick a topic.
I think a higher power is…
I think spirituality is…
I want to help you to meditate by telling you the following…
Creative Resources to check out:
Writer’s Digest - Spiritual Writing 2005
Spiritual Writing: From Inspiration to Publication by Deborah Levine and Cynthia Black
Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing edited by William Zinsser
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Exploring the World With Your Senses: Touch
By Sandra Lee Schubert | June 3, 2008
See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.
See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.
See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.
See me, feel me, touch me, heal me, heal me, heal me.
~ Pete Townshend, composer of Tommy
Do you remember the first thing you ever touched? Most likely you don’t. Nonetheless when you were young your senses were on fire. Every touch was a new experience. Watch a baby. See how they react to new textures. They are surprised most times. You can see them trying to figure out what it is they are feeling. Even when they touch something they don’t like they are still willing to keep exploring.
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and experience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - “which is the mostest? which is the leastest?” They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: the heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller, US architect & engineer (1895 - 1983)
It is important to engage in all our senses as fully as possible. Think of a potter out of touch with her clay. She might create technically correct pieces yet they would lack a certain feeling to them. There is a potter’s work I love. I like to hold her pieces. They have a wonderful feel to them. Each piece seems to have a special energy. Her whole family is involved in her work. Helping create and sell her pottery. Each item in her collection has a feeling of love in it. Wouldn’t each of us want our work to elicit that kind of energy?
I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.
~ Maya Angelou author & poet (1928 - )
An ordinary thing can be the catalyst for great works of art stimulating the imagination and creating worlds for others to enjoy. As we touch, we feel and we imbue the world with our graces. It is the experience of our everyday life that fuels the muse. Great works come from daily experiences.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Today’s Take Action Prompt: Creative Habit
By Sandra Lee Schubert | May 28, 2008
Developing the ‘Creative Habit’
Create a circle of creativity for yourself. If you have children, then make a creation afternoon and do some arts and crafts or put on a play. In fact, have the children write the play and you perform. Made this a family habit. Visit museums. Volunteer to do art at a children’s hospital or senior center. Create outings with other parents and children. Make creation fun for you and your family. Begin developing the creative habit now and break the electronic distraction habit.
Find a creative buddy. Most of us have at least one creative friend. Take outings together and support each other’s work. If your friends are less then creative, consider taking a writing or art class and buddy up with one or two people there.
Join a book group or a writers group. Hang out in creative places and pick up some creative friends.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Planting Our Creative Garden
By Sandra Lee Schubert | May 27, 2008
Spring to me is the perfect time to make plans and set goals. The air begins to vibrate, as everything starts to wake up. The birds are a bit perkier and lunchtime is for walking outside and not just huddling in warm offices. The ground has thawed enough for planting to begin. What we plant now will blossom and bear fruit in the summer and the fall. It is also the time to seed our creative gardens.
My grandmother’s garden took two forms. Her front lawn was well thought out, manicured and beautiful. A wayward dandelion knew not to rest in her grass. Flowers lined her house leading to the backyard. At first glance it mirrored the front lawn with well-placed bushes and trimmed grass. But to the back there was a line of demarcation. Behind the careful planning she gave her garden over to its natural desires. The garden was a riot of color and textures, a cornucopia of sensory pleasure. Wild flowers grew with abandon, trees linking with shrubs. Bees had their choice of nectar. My grandmother loved her perfect garden but relished her wild one, as did her grandchildren. We could walk through her wild garden and deeper into the woods where we reached a stream that we followed to all sorts of adventure. We literally entered into the creative world, wild, free and full of possibility.
The smells are what I recall. First the sweet scent of the flowers, the intoxication of the wilder flowers; then the sense of damp soil, rotted leaves that lined the stream and musky smell of moss that grew there too. The water ran clear along the stream giving off this cool air as we waded through it.
The structure and the wildness both fed our imagination. The scents still linger many years later. The garden planted then still feeds my creative imagination.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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Today’s Take Action Prompt: Sensory Explorations
By Sandra Lee Schubert | May 21, 2008
1. The Box - Fill a box with different small items that have different textures and weight to them. As example you can include a couple pieces of fabric such as burlap, silk or velvet. Put shells, rocks, marbles, keys, etc into the box. Explore it with eyes closed. Are you afraid of what you are touching? How do things feel with your eyes closed? Bring them to your face; sniff them. See if you can identify the items without looking at them.
2. Taste exercise - You can choose to do this with eyes closed or opened. Take some different fruit or food items preferably items that have different textures. Some examples would be an orange, avocado and piece of bread. Spend time looking at the items as if seeing them for the first time. Notice the shape of the avocado. Feel the texture of the orange. Sniff the bread. Take time with each one tasting, exploring and learning about these new things you have discovered.
3. Create some of your own sensory explorations. Listen to new music. Walk barefoot. Run one block really fast.
4. Write about the above as if you were an alien. What did you discover? How would you describe this new planet? How do you feel about the people you have met? How did if feel to be blindfolded in a new planet?
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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How Our Senses Influence Our Creativity: Vision
By Sandra Lee Schubert | May 20, 2008
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. ~ Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of US (1856 - 1924)
The beginning of the year we envision what that year will look like for us. According to the dictionary vision “is a special sense by which the qualities of an object (as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived and which is mediated by the eye.”
What if using this special sense we look at our lives in a new way? My eyesight is not the best. When I got my new glasses the world came back into view. I didn’t know what I had been missing. Not that everything sparkled; I couldn’t help but notice that I needed to revisit cleaning my apartment. But the fuzziness I had been living with disappeared and the edges came back into focus. It was like a sense I didn’t have before was discovered.
You are an artist and your life is what you are creating. Bring light when you can. As Goethe said on his deathbed, his last words: ‘More light!’ ~ Jan Phillips, Author, The Museletter
Making our way through the world we use all our senses. We touch, taste, feel, smell and listen. We can’t get away from all of this stimulation. Our creative selves swim in a sea of senses. The question is can we use this to be our better selves?
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. ~ Andre Gide French critic, essayist, & novelist (1869 - 1951)
Often, we follow the same daily routine. We can become stale. Our art remains the same, our words bore even us, and the music we play has no feel to it. Our routine can blind us to other possibilities. You want to write that book on whales but what really resides in you is a play about your family. Each day you plod along joylessly struggling to find the words. Still each day, each week, and every year you put the book on your goal list. Words fail you. The struggle is to create a new vision for yourself; bravely entering a new world in which you find true joy in creating.
I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. ~ Robin Green, Northern Exposure, Burning Down the House, 1992
What can we do? Use our vision differently. Don’t just create your future based on the same old vision of what you know. Discover something new. Envision an adventure for yourself. One that includes new vistas and new dreams never dreamt before.
© 2008 Sandra Lee Schubert www.writing-for-life.com
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