List of Ten: Free your Creative Mind

Art Credit Jane Ray

Every once in a while my mind gets stuck in a loop of cliche. For the life of me, I don’t have a fresh idea to bring to the table and all I can do is pick the low-hanging fruit. In writing about a young girl from a small farming town in the 1950s, I asked:

• Where should a scene take place? House, farm, truck...ugh.

• How should I up the stakes? Lying, cheating, stealing..ugh.

• What is my protagonist’s dream career? Teacher, nurse, secretary...ugh.

After struggling with this bee in my bonnet, I found a simple yet solid technique to escape cliche. I call it a List of Ten. 

“What is a list of ten?” you ask.

Whenever you get stuck try this: get out a sheet of paper, write the problem at the top, and brainstorm ten solutions. Most likely, the first three or four ideas you scribble down have been the answers that you’ve been mulling over and over. Since you are not satisfied with these solutions, you must keep going. 

“Ten why ten?” you ask.

The List of Ten works because it combines divergent and convergent thinking, which are the cornerstones of creativity. Divergent thinking generates multiple ideas from one starting point. The divergent process of creating a list requires you to use the associative or daydreaming region of the brain. You write at least ten solutions, no matter how ridiculous, because this forces fresh energy into the problem. With all the cliche out of the way and a list left to complete, I reach further. After hitting number seven, the technique really pays off. For example, in thinking about the career dreams for my farm girl, I clear out: teacher, nurse, secretary, and seamstress and finally get to zoo keeper, lingerie designer, and Russian spy. 

“But those are just unrealistic answers,” you might be thinking. “Where is the real solution?”

Now that you have fresh ideas, you must bring them back to your novel. This is where convergent thinking comes back in. Convergent thinking combines multiple pieces of information to form one solution. When I am stuck, I am trying to converge with too few, stale ideas. The divergent process of creating a list gives you fresh ideas to converge on in order to arrive at a creative and cohesive solution.

Yes, some of the solutions on your list will fall into the bat shit crazy camp. For example, I don’t want my farm girl aspiring to be a Russian spy, leading me out of historical romance into spy thriller territory, but maybe in converging on a solution with these wild solutions, I get the idea that my protagonist has a best friend who is Russian and experiencing loads of discrimination and abuse in the cold war era. So this list can infuse energy into your book, beyond the sticking point you are trying to solve. The solution could be one of those initial answers, but with the addition of this new friend, the real problem of a lack of conflict is exposed and the fight for this new friend solves it. 

Most often though, you find a novel solution to a sticky problem because you just couldn’t get out of the rut of the first three cliches. It often doesn’t drastically change the shape of your novel, but you can finally move on. And sometimes one of the solutions takes you on a wild ride of a girl picking peaches in the fifties who finally decides to follow her dream of designing racy lingerie and taking on the raging patriarchy that is trying to reassert itself after a depression and world war.  

“But I don’t wanna,” you say.

It’s amazing how when I feel stuck. I fight even the idea of a List of Ten. Just a simple exercise feels both ridiculous and arduous. I resist because it’s not only my novel that’s stuck, but my feelings are stuck too. Maybe it’s self-doubt, a lack of inertia, or a harsh inner critic. These things take more than a List of Ten to resolve for real, but the technique can circumvent them by pulling you back into creativity, fun, and momentum.

You can do this. And this will help. Even if it doesn’t solve the problem, it will get you closer to a solution. It will help you shrug off the debilitating state of stuck.

“This worked so well!” you exclaim after finally trying it.

Hooray! You don’t even have to be stuck for this to be useful, try this when you want to level up your imagination. When you want to take an ordinary scene and spice it up, make a List of Ten. I even use this tool for my real-life decisions - planning activities, buying birthday presents, or deciding on my dreams. After all, I am my own protagonist. 

“I love this blog! How do I subscribe?” you ask.

You are too kind. Writing novels is a long term investment and I don’t get too much validation, so it means the world to hear you say that. You can enter your email here, and I’ll send future posts to your inbox.

Thank you Margaret Atwood

When I was pregnant with my daughter, a friend warned me not to read The Handmaiden’s Tale. Feeling emotionally tender at the time, I heeded her advice and shelved Margaret Atwood’s iconic work for the future. A few years later, the urge came again. I just needed to read it, even though I was pregnant again with another little girl.

I had a long TBR pile on my bedside table, but The Handmaiden’s Tale demanded to jump the line. So, I dove in. And I enjoyed it. The protagonist’s voice felt both intimate and prophetic as she whispered her story to me.

Then halfway through, on August 1st, I got a phone call. A phone call that changed everything. A massive aneurysm ruptured in my mom’s brain. My mom, my first best friend. I was on the west coast while she was on the east coast. All I could do was wait. Well, wait, panic, meditate, obsessively call for information, attempt to pack a bag, and tell my mom through the ether than I love her completely.

Thanks to good weather, helicopter airlifts, and surgeons willing to take a chance on a severe case, my mom’s brain stopped bleeding late into the night. Now we just needed to wait some more. Would she survive? Would she open her eyes? Would she speak or move again?

Flights booked and bags packed, I laid down that night and tried to get the rest I would need for the coming day. But my mind whipped around trying to understand what had happened and find a way through an unfathomable new reality. I reached over to my bedside table and picked up Atwood’s book. With my friend’s warning echoing in my mind, I second-guessed my impulse. Should I read this now?

But I wanted to be with the woman they called Offred.

Offred’s situation and my own were worlds apart, but this story understood the loss, the fear, the unknown, the confusion, the pain, the crushing aloneness, and even the splinter of hope in my heart. The book held me long enough that I could close my eyes, and then at some point in the early morning hours I found a bit of sleep.

I woke into my unimaginable existence again – but I felt a little stronger.

Against all odds, my mom survived the night, and I finished The Handmaiden’s Tale at her bedside in the ICU. I haven’t picked up another book since. Once my mom opened her eyes and said my name, I wanted to be in every moment. Week after week, my mom continued to endure risk after risk, surgery after surgery, on her journey to recovery.

When I came home, I had a hard time returning to my work. How can I write? What difference does it make? And then I remembered how Margaret Atwood held me in a way that no other could in those desperate moments. So I picked up a pen.

The Public Voice of Women

Are you among the first women in your family to have a public voice?

I’ve been listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast, Magic Lessons. In season two, we meet Hope Hill, a poet who wants to take her work into the world, but fear holds her back. Elizabeth Gilbert asks her to make a list of women in her family’s history who never had a public voice and describe the lives of women that brought her into the world at this moment of history.

Hope describes her mother and grandmother as having many children while working full time and being in unhappy marriages to intense, controlling men. Further back, her ancestors were slaves. She is indeed the first woman in her family to have a public voice.

Some of our mothers may have had opportunities to speak—if their race and class allowed and they worked incredibly hard and they survived the harassment. But with a few noteworthy exceptions, our mother’s mothers and beyond hardly stood a chance.

While the waves of feminism in the twentieth century launched many women into the public arena, the effects weren’t broadly inclusive or immediate. We got to vote, but additional rights and cultural change took decades to trickle through society and still don’t reach everyone, but women kept raising their voices louder and louder.

Then, the internet arrived. Blogs, social media, audio and video sharing, and self-publishing gave us reasonable access to a public voice. Gatekeepers, mostly white men, lost their stranglehold. This, along with the continued fight for gender, racial, and LGBTQ equality, birthed a generation finally capable of speaking to the world without excessive barriers.

Feeling the full weight of our place in women’s history knocked me back. So many of us are the first generation of women with a public voice—no pressure or anything.

In this context, Hope Hill’s fear makes a lot of sense. It makes sense that following centuries of belittlement, abuse, and repression, it takes courage to speak our truth. In addition, having a public voice still does not mean we are safe, for speaking out can earn women death threats. Needless to say, Hope Hill is not alone in her apprehension. I feel nervous simply sharing this post. The question, Who am I to make such claims?, repeats in my head as I write, and I brace for rebukes after each paragraph. Did I get everything absolutely correct? Will this offend? Do I sound stupid? I just won’t post this.

Our fear makes sense, but it’s not leading us in the best direction. I am so grateful for Elizabeth Gilbert, Brene Brown, Chimamanda Adichie, Sheryl Sandberg, and other women for broadcasting the unconditional need for our creative voices in the world. They talk about courage, vulnerability, creativity, and feminism in a way that countless women, including myself, crave to hear. They invite us to find our courage to speak to a public audience, for without believing in our own voices, we won’t use them. And the world needs to hear what we have to say.

Just as valuable as sharing our voice is the ability to listen. Now more than ever, we can hear each other without filters. We can hear the strength, the wisdom, the humor, the beauty, and the compassion of women beyond our neighborhood, school, or social circle. By listening, we can see ourselves in countless lives, especially the lives of women of color whose truth has been ignored longer and silenced harder than any other.

As all of this collides—our right to speak, our means to speak, our courage to speak, and our wisdom to listen—power erupts. I believe that the #MeToo movement happened at this time in history because all these things co-occurred (along with a tipping point of misogyny). Women found the courage to speak and listen. The moment was perfectly ripe, the results amazing.

Not everything will be as monumental as #MeToo. Some movements are small. Some creations are purely for the joy of it. Having been silenced for so long, it might feel like we can only speak about the most imperative issues or that there is too much to say, but we have enough breath for all of it. Share your poems, your jokes, your fashion tips, your life’s purpose, your trauma, your vision. What stories will bubble up now that so many voices are free? What tale does your heart want to tell?

As exciting as this is, our chorus is not yet complete. There are still many women in our society that do not have a public voice. Look around to see who is silent in your community. Women in our country without the correct documentation cannot speak up without great risk to their lives, and women around the world still struggle to gain fundamental rights. We can definitely share some of our breath about this.

We have our voice now—what a privilege, an opportunity, a responsibility to share our truth. In addition to #MeToo, what else do we need to claim? What else can we hear from our fellow mothers, sisters, and daughters? Let us garner our courage and make ourselves proud.

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Daily Creative Meditation: Awareness and Intention

I love my creative time. Yet when I sit down, I often open the New York Times and then my email and maybe even Instagram (and then back to the New York Times).

When I asked myself, why don’t I just sit down and start the work I love? I found that I have some thoughts and feelings in need of recognition. Sometimes I feel tired. Sometimes I feel scared. Sometimes I want a hit of validation.

What I really want is an intentional beginning to my creative time, which for me means becoming aware of these feelings, allowing them, and then refocusing on my intention.

Meditation came to mind as a possible solution. I have meditated for years, but I never thought to combine my mindful and creative worlds…until now.

In meditation, we practice noticing thoughts. We accept them and then redirect the mind, rather than allowing it to be dragged away by distractions. It isn’t about denying our desires and thoughts, instead the practice allows us to choose where we focus our attention.

I searched for a guided meditation for writers. I really wanted something simple without music or sound effects. Since nothing answered my needs, I paired up with my soul sister, Leah Pearlman, and we created our own meditation to help begin creative time.

It’s short and sweet (four minutes), so it doesn’t take much time away from our work, but helps us start in a centered place. The mediation begins, asking us for awareness and allowance of our body, our feelings, and our thoughts in the moment. Then it addresses the big challenges that often make starting hard for us– handling distractions, feeling blocked, and questioning our own creative worth. Wrapping up, it reconnects us with our personal intentions—to create—from our core motivations.

I’ve been using this meditation for the past month and found some surprising outcomes. It didn’t magically focus me on the task at hand each and every day, but, more importantly, it helped me see and honor my emotional needs and creative energy.

During the month I used the meditation, I had set the goal of finishing a draft of my novel. So when I did my very first meditation, I was surprised by my inner response to the question: can you open to the universe of creativity? While my novel topped my to-do list, when I paid attention to my creative energy it was surging in a different direction. The meditation gave me the courage to follow it. A beautiful blog post flowed out in under an hour. I love it when that happens. It feels like magic, but maybe it’s just paying attention and aligning with my creative force.

For the first few weeks, I listened to the meditation everyday at the start of my writing time. Initially, I felt rushed by the brevity of the recording, but as a daily practice I came to really appreciate the swift check-in. Different parts of meditation spoke to me on different days, and it helped me identify what needed my attention. Soon the practice of touching in became a pattern without listening everyday. My mindfulness was primed as I sat down in my writing spot. I would listen to the meditation when I felt scattered as a way to reconnect rather than having a daily requirement.

On a few days, I found that my emotional needs for another activity spoke louder than my intention to create. I needed to rest or connect with a friend. Before this reflective practice, I might have taken these breaks, but not without a heaping dose of self-judgment. By really knowing and honoring my needs, I allowed and enjoyed being “off task” and returned naturally to my creative projects when I was ready. This meditation is not a productivity tool, but a support for self-awareness and connection with the creative force inside us.

Leah and I made our mediation available on YouTube, for those that might want to try it out. If starting your creative time on the internet doesn’t sound supportive, I am also happy to send you an mp3 file as a thank you for signing up to my newsletter. We hope you enjoy it.