Experiment with these four steps:
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- Think about your creative process (mind map, freewrite, or brainstorm with a friend). For good explanations of several prewriting tools, see https://mytext.cnm.edu/lesson/drafting-strategies/
- Write, speak, or draw your plan using whatever brainstorming tools help you to be creative.
- Upload any type of file (text, image, audio) explaining/showing your plan for the creative assignment. You can even compose your plan on paper and take a picture with your smart phone.
- Remember this is just a plan.
- Encourage your fellow creators.
Remember, the creative process has no fixed rules. You have to make them up as you go along, in other words, experiment with ideas for digital stories and decide which idea for a story works for you. Just like we defended our criteria for what makes a good digital story, the criteria for what makes a good creative process can be different for everyone.
As we have learned from Bryan Alexander, stories can be told for many purposes: to be heard, to be seen (and read), but also to be touched (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/haptic). The creative process can be a chaotic habit: trying to come up with an interesting idea is hard work. Digital stories make use of our senses in new ways.
Analog stories have always used imagery to trigger our memories of what it was like to smell a flower or taste a peach. The latest video games include haptic feedback to their visual and auditory modes. Three of the five senses are engaged when experiencing current video games. We’ll have to wait, though, on advancements in virtual reality to persuasively simulate the direct experiences of smell and taste in an immersive story.
The Greek literary theorist, Horace, persuasively wrote that good literature taught us something and entertained us at the same time. All of the best stories that I can think about have either entertained me or taught me, or ideally both. Horace wrote that creative people “wish either to profit or to delight; or to deliver at once both the pleasures and the necessaries [sic] of life” (Ars Poetica, 19 BC).
Good luck with your creative process this week, creators! Be it a nonfiction podcast, a fiction microblog, a vlog, or any other subgenre (fiction or nonfiction) of the digital storytelling universe that sparks your interest!
I hope you enjoy creating 🙂
If you have a plan, please keep on keeping on.
If you get stuck, contact me by email, @ me on Discord,
or try clicking around on the images below.
“Generating ideas is the function of heuristics, which are discovery or invention techniques. Since the time of Aristotle, heuristics have been used in the teaching and practice of rhetoric, whether spoken or written. More recently, those researching the psychology of creativity have found that heuristics can be fruitfully employed, too, for stimulating creative behavior in problem-solving situations.”
Setting Free the Birds: Heuristic Approaches to the Teaching of Creative Writing at the College Level by Peggy Baldwin Parris
The Creative Literary Web
The Creative Cinematic Star
