A Writing Exercise - 5min Creative Exercise with Krista Kankula
Hi I’m Krista Kankula! I’m a creativity coach that helps adults make time for + access their creativity & do it in a way that’s rooted in joy, playfulness and self-belief.
Have you ever been working on a creative project or maybe marketed something you’ve created and found yourself thinking “do I just say the same thing over and over again”
Or have you ever found yourself bored with the very topic you’ve centered your creative project on - not necessarily because you find it terribly boring…you’re maybe bored because you’ve spent some much time with it and spent so much time thinking about it/loooking at it in the same way.
Well today’s exercise will help you if you’re finding yourself in one of those scenarios, if you’re feeling stuck or if you simply want to activate your imagination and experiment with a little creative challenge.
I’m not sure exactly where I was/what I was thinking when I thought about this exercise, but let’s pretend I was sitting at my desk, opened my drawer - that let’s be honest is probably better described as a junk drawer/mish mash of stuff and the first thing that caught my eye was an eraser.
Today’s exercise is to challenge yourself to write for 20 minutes about an eraser.
Why an easer? Well it’s not the most exciting object in the world, but likely one we have some familiarity with.
The focus of this exercise is to think about the eraser in different ways - what other uses could it have/how could it get repurposed, get curious about it (maybe think about where/how the eraser was invented, how the first eraser was made vs. the ones that get made now) and also to use your imagination and play with telling a story about an eraser.
Let’s break down how this exercise can help you a bit more:
#1 - it’s giving you some constraints to work with. Instead of saying write about anything for 20 mins, you’re given the topic of an eraser. Constraints can work in our favour and help us generate more ideas/solutions.
#2 - It’s a creative experiment with a slight (but not overwhelming) sense of pressure. There is a time limit and so it challenges you to come up with some bit of writing in just 20 minutes. And it can help challenge our thinking of what’s possible to create in a smaller chunk of time. And hey if you have a writing deadline, you can recall that time you did an exercise like this and you were able to be calm, cool and creative under pressure and get it done.
#3 This one sort of contradicts the last one - but I think you’ll get where I’m going with it. Even though the time may induce a bit of pressure, the exercise itself is low stakes. There’s no assignment to turn in, you don’t have to publish it as a blog post or turn this draft story about an eraser into a novel. You don’t have to worry about whether it’s interesting or your audience or editor or anyone for that matter will like or read what you wrote - because its just for you.
I hope you give this exercise a try - for the record I did and I began a story about the last eraser on earth who kept escaping its glass case in the museum where it was to be on display, so it could go live in the forest with its best friend the pencil. Cheesy? Yeah, but its an exercise I’ll definitely lean on in the future to bring some fun into the writing process, challenge myself and see what other stories I can come up with.
Think about how you can apply the elements of this exercise to what your creating - constraints, being curious, looking at it from different perspectives, making things up/using your imagination.
Let us know what this exercise was like for you + what it inspired in your writing. Tag Ryan