Creativity

Writing Games w/ Life Lessons

Garth Beyer
Guess Who Is In Control: You or The Pencil?

Success is really what you call “Mastered Creativity”. What you will find below are some constructed writing challenges and exercises to push your creativity.  They are formed in a way to apply practice to parts of writing (and thinking) you have rarely practiced before. The goal is to get your creative mind to push limits, stretch its imagination and to give it a game to play.

To have an open and expanded mind that is capable of using objects, sounds, movements, etc., and turn them into something solid and applicable is exactly what the most successful creators do. So why not start with the basics – Creative Writing. You might just realize that there are some life lessons to be learned from the writing exercises.

1. Newspaper Headline: I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading all the negativity in the newspaper. Old Zig Ziglar always said that the reason foreigners can come to America and become millionaires within a year is that they can’t read all the negativity in the newspaper. For this challenge, write your own headline article for the newspaper and share what you think is important enough for all to know. Lesson: Make sure the positive is what remains on the front page. Focus on the good, the happy, the love and remember to share it with everyone. Put all of the negativity in the obituary section.

2. Oddvertisement: You have seen great advertisements that may have even gotten you to buy something, but you have also seen terrible ads that feel like a continuous prod in the ribs. Advertisements are only fun when you see an advertisement for something odd. That’s why I call it an Oddvertisement. Open up your pantry or closet and dig for something in the far back that never gets used. Now it’s time to sell it. Write an oddvertisement that is creative and encouraging enough for someone to consider buying it. Lesson: Anyone can make a sale, but only the creative make a living off of it. There is always a different way to look at things, you just have to have the right mindset.

3. MadLib Promotion: While MadLibs are extremely fun. The joy can be even more fruitful when you are the one who created the MadLib for someone else to complete. Lesson: Challenge others by giving them the authority to choose what word goes in a certain spot.

4. Word Of The Day Stories: Dictionary.com has a Word of The Day every day. For a beginner writer, try freewriting and using the words from the last seven days. For a more expert writer, create a story using all of last months words. To take it a step further, you can even start your story by using the time and setting of  the actual month that you are using the new words from. Lesson: Time really does go by quickly, yet it’s still possible to learn something new everyday and apply it to your life.

5. Improv Writing: Improv, Improv Character Building, Improv-ing Writing Skills  Lesson: People-observation skills and the ability to make a correct judgement can be critical in some situations. In others, it’s necessary to keep an open mind about a person since truly, you don’t know where they come from, what they are thinking or where they want to go in life.

6. Who’s Quote Is It Anyway?: Have a list of famous quotes you absolutely love? Create a story that implements them word by word, as the theme, or by using your own derivative of the meaning. Give the quote an all new definition and background. Who knows, if you switch it up enough, you just might be quoted for it. Lesson: Emulating The Successful Through Quotes.

7. Poetry Walk Or Meditation. While walking and becoming aware of all that is around you, carry a journal and write down notes and ideas to create a poem from. Lesson: Living in the moment and remaining aware.

8.  Connect-The-Sentences: Either pull random sentences from different books or use sentences you have recently heard someone say. Make three columns and in the first and third, write down the sentences that you gathered. The middle column is for you to write your own sentence that can connect the first and third sentences. The more challenging you want it, the more columns you can add, making every other column blank. Lesson: To achieve anything in life from where you are, you have to create a bridge. There is never skipping steps. You can’t just skip the middle column of this writing game or skip the work you need to do to get to where you want to be in life. It’s also great to realize that you can make the bridge as interesting and be as creative as possible.

9. Word Jump. While freewriting, start every sentence with the word that you blindly land your finger on in a book or newspaper. Lesson: You never know what’s going to pop up in your life to knock you off track. Are you creative enough to adapt and overcome?

10. Guest Post: Instead of getting a guest to write a blog post for you, you write it. Open up the post like you normally would on a  subject of your choice (preferably controversial, but it doesn’t need to be). Then introduce your guest that will be writing a post on the subject (Create an alias for yourself). Now begin writing from a different perspective, as the guest blogger. Lesson: Getting different perspectives.

11. Word Play: Write a poem with word play… wait, weight, waste, waist, hole, whole. Lesson: Simply just fun!

12. I Write Dead People: Open up a newspaper to the Obituary section and write a story about how a person died. Lesson: Makes you happy to be alive doesn’t it? Life’s too short to not be creative.

13. Telephone Book Tale: Open to a random page of your yellow book, placing your finger on a part of the page and using what is written in that ad, put it in your story. Did your finger lie on a Muffler shop? Has there been a recent murder there? Was all that was left at the scene a piece of paper and the phone number which has been disconnected? Big yellow phone books don’t do any good unless you can write a story from them. Lesson: Nothing is ever as it seems.

14. Where Do You WANT To See Yourself In 5 Years?: Simple as that. Write every detail, every dream come true, every aspect of the life you want. Get crazy with it! So many people will ask you this throughout your life. Create an answer that will blow them away.

 

Stay Positive & Then Follow Through To Make That 5th Year Come True

Garth E. Beyer

Why The Most Famous Writers, Thinkers and Artists Were All Hypnagogia Hallucinators, Narcoleptics and Crack Addicts

Garth Beyer

No, really they just knew how to create legendary ideas in their Hypnopomic, lucid dreaming, state. They were tired but wired to great ideas. (Often thought of being crack addicts and narcoleptic because of their outlandish behaviors, out-worldly ideas and out-of-mind-into-mouth slander of which they eventually became famous for)

I will bet that you have had this sensation as well. Let me explain further,

Have you ever stayed up really late in order to accomplish a task, possibly an essay and quickly dominated it with creativity? or it was just extremely late and you decided you would draw before bed and turned out you were in the body of Van Gogh? Or even more simply, you just stayed up really late and started thinking about random genius ideas? You were likely hallucinating in your hypnagogia state: The other hallucinogenic state that no one knows about – which will still make you famous.

“It’s fun staying up late. It makes your mind all funky. Some things just can’t be perceived unless we’re mentally and physically exhausted”

When you get to that degree of sleepiness, your subconscious begins to elevate as if you were on the verge of sleep. By writing, painting, and creating when you are this tired, you are letting information about preposterous concepts, that are typically blocked by conscious thoughts and distractions, become manifestations. That is why the state is also called the borderland of sleep.

In real time, you are actually contemplating, mulling over and creating a synapses of ideas that, deep down, you truly want to consider, but were previously blocked from consideration by the conscious. In this sense, you are letting your mind to revert back to its original state of limitless possibilities.

Another example to help you connect with this irrational idea (it’s irrational right now because you are most likely not reading this at 1:00 am in the morning. Please read again and participate in the activity at the end of this post at 1:00 am tomorrow)

The Tetris Affect:  I am sure you can remember when you went to sleep and your dreams were consumed with the events that most recently occurred. The Tetris Affect occurs when you go to sleep and begin dreaming of the subject that was of the greatest intensity and focus; both throughout the day and more importantly right before sleep. I had this happen to me the other day when I finally played Basketball outside (Spring has Sprung). It was the highlight of my day and the event that took place near bedtime. The combination of the two lead to the Tetris Affect. Guess what my dreams were of?

I found this resource to be very communicative at describing steps to induce yourself into the lucid state of dreaming, but in more honesty, nothing beats simply staying up late and letting it happen naturally.

There is no greater process than breaking the night time-sleep version of a runners high. No greater feeling then losing your ego, feeling a reverse black hole in your brain, feeling heightened sensitivity and stimulation, feeling an internal detachment from the physical and mental environment turning into a fast paced sin wave of psych and unbounded subjectivity.

Below you will find a free writing session I had after I stayed up past 2:30am writing an essay. What works for me with hypnagogia and may work for you, is that in addition to thinking of genius ideas for the world, our lives and more often then naught, essays – I also end up creating a flow of unorthodox free writing segments which I later refer to as a resource to add quirkiness, randomness and brilliance to my prose and poetry when I am not writing in the sleep state. I hope you enjoy and I would love to read the Hypnagogia stories you write.

If I climbed a tower for every bottle of wine I’ve broken, I’d be 24 Eiffel towers high, i would make the sky seem low making time feel slow, so i wrote this note and this is how it goes .. sunshine is racing to the green terrace my mind is pacing, slanted trees, thoughts slow as a breeze, caught in every intricate corner of my frame, wicked webs holding me in- sane. Causing me to smirk, at my mighty fine work, As i dance on the dust of wishes being whispered and lost, pleading for the arrival of this out worldly superstitious survival, oh. just watch me walk across this river, as the children turn the world upside down on the monkey bars and snicker, this life just a faithful conception of a falsely figured illusion.

soaring to the outskirts of the demands, being made in this world by suffocating gentlemen hand-shaken, the relevance of what lies below makes no sense to them, if any the transcendence to the most fathomable possibilities is slow, yet the camera can take snapshot after snapshot. the blank canvas creeps to such an alternative degree that even if the light above your head flashed you could not see. the depravities of the selfless inner case, can not be transferred unless a whole is cut through the base, the prescribed perception only lies, and some people dance and some people die.

the tsunami castled the overlord under sheets of white, just to caress the current – lover, only for the moon to rise, and wish forever, more pleasant constellations each night, the wash could not have came in closer contact with one another. for you have my heart forever, forever my heart has you, entwined more intricately then the labyrinth of your crystal eyes, the wave covered in a shade of immortality, the deepest sense of passionate disguise, the curtains curtsied in pleasant surprise, and so the story fin’s. end of the nigh.

Stay Positive and Dead On One’s Feet, But Alive In One’s Mind

Garth E. Beyer

I claim the free-writing portion I shared as mine since I have used and will still refer back to it for additional writings. If you wish to use any part of the hypnagogia free-writing, please email me at TheGarthBox@gmail.com to obtain confirmation of information sharing. Thank you for your acknowledgment of copyrights.

Improv, Improv Character Building, Improv-ing Writing Skills

Garth Beyer

Jim McClearahew is not an average “Jim”. You can tell he is battling his nearly schizophrenic impulses. Or maybe he is just checking out the woman that decided to eat at Subway instead of McDonalds. For me, I have to question Jim’s motives as I retrace his line of sight back to him, I finally notice that he has a purse with him. Glancing back at the woman ordering at Subway, it’s quite clear that of all people, Jim would be the last to ever get a chance with that woman. Obviously the purse is not hers. I conclude that the purse in question, is actually a man-purse. This leads me to believe that Jim is in a deep philosophical analysis of his sexuality. It becomes clear to me that he is staring at the woman in an attempt to discover why he does not find her exceedingly attractive.

As I let him continue contemplating his life without the fear of him matching my gaze, I begin to observe his clothes and notice that his shirt is not buttoned on the top two buttons. He must be Italian. The shirt which has no Italian vibes to it must have been given to him by his recently deceased aunt who was Irish and lived in the suburbs of New York.

Continuing to observe him I notice that he is wearing Crocs. You are going to have to trust me that I would not make this up since you cannot see it in the picture. Despite my deep efforts to continue teaching you (the reader) a lesson, I can’t fathom looking at his Crocs a moment longer. I apologize if you are one who wears them, but don’t let that stop you from learning the lesson from this.

WOW

If you know anything about the show “Who’s Line Is It Anyway” than you know that it is all Improv — everything is made up on the spot. No rehearsing, no memorizing lines, purely provided to the audience the moment the idea enters the brain. Heres a definition  of improv if you are sadly unfamiliar with this incredibly hilarious show.

Now you know about Improv and whether you realized it or not, you know how to use Improv to build characters. Whether you are in an improv group like me, or love to write (also like me), then being able to create characters for your skits and written works is extremely important. Let’s jump back to Jim.

I don’t know him if you didn’t catch that. I was just enjoying some Sbarro at the food court with my journal and while I was eating I picked out a person that was sitting alone.  Did I do an alright job at building a short character background of him? Looking at the picture again, I have to point out that the little boy to his left in the red shirt is pointing and laughing at him for wearing crocs.

Next time you catch a snag in your writing or acting skills, go to a place similar to a food court where a lot of people go. It is best to go to a place that the majority of people are sitting down since you will have to study them for a little while.  Bring a notebook and a pen and start creating background stories of people. You will quickly find that with enough practice you will start creating back ground stories for people as you walk down the street, or drive past someone in a car. I have always hated asking the question “I wonder what they do for a living”. Now I love asking myself the question, because I can always make up an answer.

Stay Positive and Focus On Improv-ment

Garth E. Beyer

LOOKING FOR A WINNER

I know you have what it takes, but does everyone else? Take a picture of someone in a similar setting like the one above and create a background story of them. Send it to me and I will choose the winner. The winner will get a full on creative writing/creative acting/creative life interview with me and have their submission posted with the interview on my blog and other social media outlets.

Guidelines:

  • No longer than one page long, double-spaced.
  • Refrain from using vulgar language, readers are confronted with enough conflict on a day-to-day basis
  • Shame on you if you use real names, unless of course their name is hilarious like Jacob Tinkletime.
  • Really enjoy it, this is supposed to be a fun and creative exercise. Do NOT make it complicated for write with forced effort.

This is an ongoing process, you can submit once each month. I will be choosing a new winner at the end of each month.