I don’t know about you, but when I’m having an emotional day or going through a rough period of time, I don’t tend to think about being creative. But my mom recently shared with me an article from Rebelle Society on 6 Sweet Survival Tips for Sensitive Souls.
One of the tips on there is being creative…
The interesting thing for me is when I HAVE been creative during my most emotional moments, I have come up with the most vivid and incredible poetry, blog posts, stream of consciousness writing, and other forms of creativity.
It can be hard though to step out of my emotional state which tends to be a tornado or whirlwind of going through the emotions as well as focusing on the cause of the emotion (as well as trying to fix or address or resolve whatever the cause) and turn it into something creative.
But it shouldn’t be so hard, should it? Our stories and the experiences of our characters must have rich emotional experiences. If we haven’t felt what our character has felt – even a little bit – how real could it ever be?
I encourage all of my readers – and writers – to use the next emotional day and turn it on it’s head into something creative.
It may begin by journaling and simply writing out the feelings that are the cause. But can you turn that journal into something different? What if you took on a story or even a character experience just what you are experiencing? What would they say? Would they say it differently? What caused their distress or sadness or hope or sorrow or happiness?
Start a collage of images that describe how you are feeling. Use colors to express and pasta on yellows for melancholy and blues for dreamy and reds for excitement.
Start writing out a list of words that come to your mind. It doesn’t even have to be words to relate how you feel just yet – just see what you come up.
Have you ever used your emotions to aid your creativity? How do you take your emotional days and turn them into creative works of art or stories?
You know, I'm def not a poetry writer, but the few times I've written it and liked it were all at least quiet, introspective moments, as well as emotional.
I've been able to write great poetry on my emotional days.
Pretty much the only way I can create poetry that isn't the utterly inane variety is when I'm in a depressive state. My mind is insanely creative (mostly because I am both insane and creative). Sadly, most people don't get where I'm going with my creations, as I tend to go off in all directions!
Sometimes being creative is literally the only thing that has kept me from offing myself.
Good post and usually tragic events spurn my creative juices but they have to be tragic events that happen to someone else. If the tragedy happens to me, then I freeze. Recently, the overdose of Phillip Seymour Hoffman prompted a poem about drugs.
I remember one period I was going through a couple years ago. one of many bits of depression I experienced. I don't remember if it was brought on by or coincided with a movie that hit me hard with its blindsiding ending. ultimately, I wrote a short story about the dark place me and my character were in and it was very freeing.