Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Creativity Tools - Practice Creativity, Beanstalk, Random Sentence Generator

"Too old to be creative"?  Being "older than a child" can have its creative advantages too.  You have a certain advantage from your years of experience from being alive longer than them so-called "youthful holders of hyperactive imagination".  If you take your years of experiencing the world's subtleties and complexities, and combine them with a child's openness, you can explore the possibilities and draw inspiration from those very years of experience.  It just takes a little practice.  Here's a few easy-to-use, free places to get regular inspiration.

Try signing up for a free daily creative activity at "The Beanstalk Project".  You can get a 5-minute creativity activity in your email inbox, to practice those creativity muscles once every day.  Past examples are also on their blog: http://dailycreativeactivity.wordpress.com/.

The signup should look like this.  There's also a link that goes to their archive seen below:

If you go to their blog, it should look like this.


Sometimes one needs something to spark an idea, or something to get the snowball moving during brainstorming, to get ideas flowing and to think outside the box.  Or just something to write a blog post about.

You can access a free random sentence generator at this link:
http://watchout4snakes.com/wo4snakes/Random/RandomSentence
There's also generators for random words, "phrases" (two words), and paragraphs.  For some of them, you can control the parts of speech and common-ness of the words.

(This is an example output sentence.)
 Interpretation:
Original Art:  Howard Chiam 2013
"An illegal dictator-ship pales under a (giant) square-d chestnut."

Using the random sentence generator feels quite similar to certain language-learning mnemonic techniques, as well as a fantasy character/scene generator technique:  http://fantasygenesis.blogspot.ca/ for examples.  There's a book written by that author that shows you the technique if you want to find out for yourself.

I've tested these techniques a few times to find something interesting to draw when I can't find enough inspiration to draw something new; just combine things quasi-randomly to create something different; and following the anecdotes of discovery in science, a new idea can = old ideas combined by chance.

(Please note that I do not own the aforementioned websites.  Use at your own discretion.  I am not responsible for any unintended consequences of your creativity and fun, however if you do have a good time, feel free to share and let me know how it goes!)