This was me in highschool. I know, your school is probably a little different now. Image via Wikipedia
After reading a lot of 'writing advice' available on the good ol' internet I found a lot of it was concentrated on creating characters, grammar... oh you're already asleep? Yes, I know most of it is boring but also important. This takes the fundamental freedom and fun out of writing creatively. You have to have fun when you are writing, sometimes you have to be so excited about some paragraph or even a line you have to pop another valium to stay in control (just kidding kids, drugs are for grown ups).
Sensible versus Wacky
There are more than two forms of writing but for the purposes of this advice I will write about sensible writing and wacky writing and the two combined. All of us (unless you have never been educated at all in which case you probably can't read and I don't know why you are browsing articles) you would know of the rules and facts that surround sensible academic work. For example when you are writing an article or essay on history you need facts, quotes etc. unless you are a holocaust denier or flat earth supporter in which case just make stuff up.
I will take my first example of this sensible form of writing colliding with the wacky way my brain sometimes work from a formative year in my life. In my final year of high school I remember an in class exam (which counted towards our final yearly grade) which was based on our final state wide exam. I have never been the most conscientious of students, and tend to 'wing it'. It is very important to know when you can or have to make leaps of faith in life.
Before the exam I made a slightly ridiculous claim that no matter what the 'creative' question in the exam would be I would only write on one topic: chickens. I do like to follow things through even though nobody thought this was a wise topic. It was even less wise after reading that the question was some sort of drab letter, obviously unrelated to general avian varieties. Still I wrote a piece about chickens and its antagonist was a rooster named Maximillian. I assumed this would backfire on my teacher who had already explained to me in the nicest way possible that I was a little too slow to be in such a high level English course.
Success! While it wasn't perfect marks, this wacky piece managed to get the top marks presumably because the teacher had read thirty other exams with drab stories. Top score for that question, which to my surprise seemed to make the geeky smart kid angry. I remember his comment was: “if I had written my answer about chickens then I could have gotten good marks as well”. Yes, could have, should have, but unfortunately you didn't.
That is why I am now an editor of a website and he is drinking cheap wine in a park somewhere. Actually I have little idea where anyone is from those far off high school days. You are probably wondering where is my writing advice? Why hasn't he told me how I can write creatively and live creatively like the article title states??!! Simple because I cannot. The moral of this story (nothing stolen from 'Chicken Little' or 'Animal Farm', well maybe a little) is to live and write creatively you must do.
One of my favourite bible quotes and probably the only Hebrew (let alone nonsense Hebrew) that I know is “shav shalav shav shalav”. This translated is thought to mean “do and do, do and do, do and do”. That is the best advice for writing, yes you should learn the tools of the trade such as grammar, spelling (well we do have spell checkers now) and so forth but the most important tool is your mind and in order to be creative you have to let it run free. So, my friends, to be creative think outside the box to improve, but to create make that box a circle.
By KJ Halliday
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