8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: sparks of imagination

Chapter List

  • Drift Works

    Is your creative space a refuge? 

    I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing our minds away into imaginary spaces. 

    We all do this, I think. Maybe we don’t always think of it like this, but letting our minds wander through crafted scenarios, daydreaming, thinking over problems and relationships, pondering strange ideas and realities… it all adds up to a kind of mental drift work.

    It feels foundational to creativity, to me at least.

    I had a quirky childhood—we all do I suppose—and my imagination was a place I could sneak away to when I needed to get away from reality. Oops. A bit of personal insight there—maybe, but I think there are likely a lot of us who use imagination as a kind of escape from the here and now.

    I’m certainly no therapist, but it does lead me to ponder how much creative expression is intertwined with exploration of our own mental realms—and how much of it happens because we are cleaning out the cobwebs of our own consciousness while we’re biding time hiding out from real world problems.

    As an adult I escape into meditative spaces when I run or write or just sitting back in a comfortable chair, and some of the best ideas I have are not things I’m chasing down but rather explorations I’m making through this mental space I’ve built for myself over a lifetime.

    I thought maybe that was weird… but perhaps it’s just human.

  • No Dice

    Among the first question I assume you have asked (or wanted to ask) of anyone attempting to write a daily blog (like this) is where do all the ideas come from?

    It’s no easy thing to think of something reasonably new and at least a little interesting to write about every day.  I will admit that, sure, I only post five days a week, Monday to Friday, but still: that is about twenty posts per month, and at least four thousand words spread across around five entries uploaded like clockwork each weekday.

    Brainstorming is key.

    I have written in the past about going for walks with a notepad, or sitting at the window in the cafe pondering the world while I wait for the sparks of imagination to ignite.  This month I tried something new: story dice[1].

    If you are a creative writer no doubt you’ve seen these, maybe even own these. Dice with pictograms on the side that are meant to help authors come up with fictional story plots.  But here’s the thing: I have found, strangely enough, that the little icons on each face of each die is abstract enough that rolling three or four fresh cubes gives just the right boost to my imagination, primed by the topics of this blog, to spark a few solid ‘X meets Y in the context of Z’ points into my digital brainstorming notebook.

    In fact, at least a dozen of the posts you’ll likely read in April spawned out of this random rolling of inspirational fate. So I suppose then that ideas, with the right tool and mindset, can come from pretty much anywhere.