For the Fun of It

My husband showed me a video a couple of days ago that I can’t get out of my mind. It’s on a web site called TheFunTheory.com and the video is right on the front page, called Piano Staircase. Someone asked – how can we get people to take the stairs instead of the escalator? Someone else said – how about we make it fun?!

Only a few seconds into the video, I was already thinking about writing applications. How can we make our work more fun? I think the answer is personal and different for everyone. One thing I started this week was a beginning drawing class. I read that the different creative outlets are linked in the brain so that doing one creative thing will also help your brain to be more creative in the other areas. I am also going to get back into my guitar and keyboard playing when our belongings arrive.

But that line of thinking can take you far, far away from writing. If we spend all of our time doing “other” creative things, when will we have time to put that hopefully-renewed energy into writing? How can we make the writing itself more fun?

Last week I was reading a blog interview with a creativity expert who said the color green inspires more creativity. I was startled and thrilled to realize walking around my new apartment later that both the bedroom and the office are painted pale green! Then yesterday I bought some green pens to write with. The color makes me want to laugh (I don’t know why, it just makes me happy, I guess! LOL!) and I’ve been enjoying writing longhand this week.

When I unpack and arrange my desk in the new office, one of the first things I’m going to do is find all my toys and put them back on my desk. I have two dolls of “Boo” from the Monsters, Inc. movie, several toys from recent movies that I got by ordering kids meals at fast food restaurants, a very bouncy ball, a yellow stress ball with a huge smiley face on it, my Doctor Who doll/figure that my husband gave me for Christmas, and some little stuffed animals. I also have a remote control Mike from Monsters, Inc. that someone gave me. I used to run that thing all over when I just needed “something else” to do with my brain, and often I’d have an idea while I was playing!

We’ve heard many of these ideas before. That’s why we’ve all tried one or more of them. But let’s think outside the box. What can we do that is part of our writing that would make it more fun for us, which would get us to write for more and longer periods of time, and hopefully to be more creative as we wrote?