To trade goods or services without the exchange of money.
A tagline to a newspaper article caught my eye: “Uninsured Can Exchange Talents for Care.” Lincoln Hospital, in The Bronx, is offering artists in that borough of NYC a chance to get health care; they get credits for each hour worked that can be used towards a variety of medical treatments & prescriptions. Their program, Lincoln Arts Exchange, is modeled after the Artist Access program at Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center.
Bartering is nothing new. It is used in markets across the world, trading goods. Services may have taken a back seat, but the idea works for me. I have no “goods” to barter, but I do have a “service,” and that is my art, whether it’s a performance (Storytelling or Interactive Theater), workshop, or Editing/Copy writing service. With money tight, if I can exchange some of my time and energy to get something I need…bartering is a great idea.
When I ran my theater company (The Brothers Grinn: 1994-2006), I rarely paid for rehearsal space (until the need for an abundance of NYC members of the company). I bartered with a few places (Two churches and a couple of other locations), offering them either free group performances or solo workshops for weekly rehearsal space. This was a huge savings for a company that was young and toured an average of 120 performances a year. We had no “home” space to perform/work out of but the spaces I found worked for us on many levels; the money I saved that way was put into many things the company needed (costumes; sound equipment; insurance; etc).
What Creative Service Do You Have To Barter?
Health Care, rehearsal space, food…what can you add to the list? I’ve only just started a very small section of what could be possible if more would open their minds to the idea: Artists have something to offer.
There are a tremendous amount of very talented people on the internet. It’s a statement that may seem obvious, but there are a number who shine brighter than others. Creative and with a heart: that’s Adriene Joyce, or, as she seems to often prefer, Sweepy Jean. She is a poet, editor and a great online friend and supporter.
I’m thrilled to be given the opportunity to talk about creativity on Stuart’s blog. When I first “met” Stu, it became clear early on that I was in the presence of someone who takes his creativity seriously. For his efforts, he produces a lot of good work across genres and disciplines, which serves as an example of what we can all strive for.
For those of you who don’t think you have a creative bone in your body, think again.
Human beings are naturally creative, and evidence of it goes back to the beginning of time through the sheer act of survival. How else is it that we have coped with our environment? As a species, our creativity has led us to the invention of the wheel, the crafting of tools, and to the development of technology. On an individual level, human infants quickly learn the types of behaviors and interactions with others that will increase their chances of getting their physical and emotional needs met.
We build upon these skills throughout childhood and beyond. If we’re doing it right, we never stop coming up with creative ideas for living. I almost think we can’t help but to live creative lives.
Parents find creative ways to teach their children all the time. Planning meals and budgeting our money are creative acts. Even people who have “uninteresting” jobs or jobs that require repetition use their creativity to figure out ways to perform them as efficiently as possible. The list goes on and on.
What about for those of us with a calling to the “fine” arts? As is true of all artists, my work as a poet is influenced by everyday, ordinary life. For me poetry is a creative way to communicate my version of the truth to others.
It’s what all humans do: We tell our stories and compare and contrast them, hoping to arrive at what life really means.
Adriene’s latest creative pursuit is the Third Sunday Blog Carnival for poetry, fiction, and essays on writing. You can find her on Twitter @sweepyjean
In this changing economy, and as we get older, it becomes more important to stay flexible and find other outlets and sources to maintain a creative life. This is very true for those without a fixed/steady income, like myself. I see “possibilities” for the future, and strive to work on a positive today. It’s not always easy, but…as the quote I used the other day:
“I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy, I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.”
I would like to make 2012 a positive year:
The Year of Learning and Creativity.
For me, things are starting to move in that direction; slowly but (hopefully) surely:
I will be working with OPERA America on a four month project, creating an operetta with composer Zach Redler for a group of Manhattan seniors. I’ll be co-directing and writing the book and libretto from stories from the seniors.
Jeff Wirth (Interactive Acting) has opened the door to something new for me: possibly being a member of his NYC iTeam. I met Jeff a number of years ago and had the pleasure to also work with him. This starts soon and I have fingers crossed, as this sounds to be an exciting project.
My book of collected stories and poetry, The Path From Love, will be published soon by Trestle Press (eBook for now; possible print later in the year). Article by me on their website: Crossing Genres
Re-writes of my play, ...everywhere I look, and getting it back out on the road.
A number of already booked storytelling gigs.
May 2012: The Rule of Three Blogfest-The Return to Renaissance
and…some more things that are too soon to mention.
I want to thank Misha Gericke for giving me the title for this blog post (unwittingly, maybe, but it fits a lot of things); ALL the guest bloggers who helped me out in the latter part of 2011 when I got sick; a certain very special someone who has entered my life and has only enriched it, in so many ways; and all of you, the readers of BornStoryteller (and hopefully Tale Spinning too).
“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.” ~Albert Einstein
I’ve know Rita Bregman for a long time, more as an online presence but we have met, and talked on the phone. A displaced New Yorker living just outside of San Fransisco, Rita is a talent writer and good friend.
For a return engagement, Corrine O’Flynn offers further thoughts on the creative process.
The Creativity Series: Guest Post
Journaling to Unleash Creativity
Ask a creative person what they do to keep track of their ideas and you’ll find many different answers. Some will file them away mentally until they can revisit them later, others will use a voice recorder, and still others will email themselves, call their own voice mail, or make lists. I do all of these things. But my tried and true solution to problems that crop up in my stories is usually found within my journal.
Creativity can become stifled if we’re unable to move beyond a certain sticking point. In my case, as a writer, I will find myself staring into the dark abyss of a plot hole and wonder how in the world I am supposed to get my characters from point A to point B while maintaining whatever was happening at the moment on the page. My head will be stuck on some minute detail, and then everything stalls, leaving me unable to find a solution.
Awareness of my tendency to do this does nothing to keep it from happening, mind you. Our minds play tricks on us in broad daylight!
Enter my journal. In a case like this I will pull out my journal, grab a pen, and start writing out the issue long hand. I’ll write out a question at the top of the page like, “What is the problem with Character D at this point?” And then I’ll start writing out an answer as if I was explaining to someone who was not familiar with my story. Eventually, I will get lost in the telling of the issue and start brainstorming the possible solutions I’ve come up with.
Maybe they could go here and discover this fact before such-and-such happens, or maybe they don’t find this detail out until they arrive at the next town. Or, maybe they don’t stop here at all and instead…
Thinking through a problem like this is like taking part in a one-man brainstorming session. When you start being open to putting the issue down without worrying about the writing, and instead with a goal of problem solving in mind, you free yourself from that sticking hold on your brain.
Journaling to unleash your creativity in this way can bring about many different solutions, sometimes making you change everything once a gem of an idea emerges. It forces you to separate your ego from the stunning and fabulous idea that has you stuck in the first place and allows you to come up with alternative (and equally fabulous) solutions to your problem.
Do you journal to solve creativity problems?
Bio:
Corinne loves to write about fictional dark and fantastical things. You can find her on her blog and on twitter @CorinneOFlynn
One of the major pluses in being asked to join a group of writers Triberr is that I have “met” a really nice group of people. In my search for guest blogs Raine Thomas is one of those writers who has taken my creativity challenge and run with it.
Sit back, relax… And set your creativity free
The Creativity Series: guest blog
Set Your Creativity Free: Raine Thomas
Thanks, Stu, for the invite to visit with your readers today! It’s a pleasure to be here. I can only hope to entertain them a fraction as much as you—such a talented storyteller—usually do.
It’s funny. When Stuart mentioned that he was sponsoring a series of guest posts about creativity, my first thought was: Sure! I’m a writer. Not only that, but my books are YA fantasy/romance. You have to have a lot of creativity to write successfully in that genre, right? I can SO do this.
So why did I sit down to write this blog and stare at the blank page without a thing jumping into my head?
Look, it happens…those terrible moments when what usually flows so naturally for us screeches to a soul-wrenching stop. For writers, of course, it’s called writer’s block. For other artists, well, whatever the term, the result is the same.
Our creativity feels imprisoned inside us. It leaves us frustrated and concerned. It might even make us question our own abilities.
What to do, what to do?
In my case, I often use music and meditation (of sorts) to break ideas free. I’m even now listening to Spotify and chilling on my love seat as I type. The songs I’ve opted to listen to include the latest hit list. A song by Mat Kearney (“You Can Count on Me”) just triggered something that had me pausing in my blog writing to jot a note for my WIP. That kind of thing happens for me a lot. I LOVE music!
Life also provides inspiration when writer’s block sets in. I have a five-year-old daughter with more drama contained in her 45-inch frame than you’ll find at Juilliard on any given day. I’ll sit down at my laptop for an hour and when I glance up, she’s flouncing into the room wearing a neon pink boa, huge sunglasses and sparkly high-top sneakers , waving a flashlight and pretending to lead a parade of—get this—gypsy clowns. You know when I see that kind of magic in my own family room that I have to find a way to fit it into my stories.
If I still find myself scratching my head over my writing, I look to other ways to release my creativity. Sometimes that means borrowing some colored pencils from my daughter and sketching something, or even just coloring a page of her My Little Pony coloring book with her. Other times, I might look through magazines and mentally refurnish my house (with someone else’s checkbook). Another (okay, strange) activity that works for me is washing the dishes. More often than not, by focusing on simple things outside of my writing, I set my creativity free.
I’ve been asked many times since my books were published how I thought of the Estilorian world I created. The answer? I made sure my creativity was flowing as freely as possible every time I wrote.
Now you know how I did that—and you know what? I managed to pen a blog about it, after all!
Raine Thomas is the author of the exciting and original series of YA fantasy/romance novels about the Estilorian plane, including the Daughters of Saraqael trilogy and the upcoming Firstborn trilogy. She is a proud member of Romance Writers of America and is a contributing blogger to The Writer’s Voice. When she isn’t planning weddings, writing or glued to social networking sites, she can usually be found on one of Florida’s beaches with her husband and daughter or crossing the border to visit with her Canadian friends and relatives.
Raine Thomas
Daughters of Saraqael Trilogy:
BECOMING | CENTRAL | FORETOLD http://www.RaineThomas.com http://twitter.com/Raine_Thomas
Stu wanted a post about creativity and the first thought that struck me was the initial act of creativity. As writers, we all know about the second and third and sixteenth drafts, and the critiques and so on, but what about the initial spark. What about that moment when you first pull the words out of the ether and put them together into a sequence that (hopefully) makes sense?
This set me thinking about writers going back a century ago, and their initial act of creation. It’s very different from writers today. Even just going back to the Forties or Fifties – before the advent of television and certainly before the advent of the internet – a writer sitting in a room was not bombarded with any of the things that they are now. There was no sensory overload. The writer sat – as many writers still do – with a pen and paper, or at a typewriter, but the mind worked differently.
Many writers probably still sit quietly writing and don’t have all this external flotsam coming in, but I would imagine that’s increasingly less common. There’s this constant multi-tasking going on. Previously, if a writer got to a point where they needed to research something, they would have just made a note – “Need to research that” – and gone back to the writing, or gone off and picked up an encyclopaedia. But the speed which we can research something now is amazing. And, of course, this is not always a good thing. Because while you can research 18th century Parisian townhouses in a couple of Google clicks, this doesn’t make up for the two hours subsequently lost reading about the Three Musketeers. (No idea how I got to that page!)
For a long time – probably since the first person sat at a desk with parchment and a writing implement – writers pretty much sat at their desks and wrote. And they still do, but there are different ways of going about it now. I often use a Dictaphone, and it’s a much more off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness way of writing. So, I can be dictating whilst looking at something else, and all these ideas are coming at me, and I can stop and research, and so on. And oftentimes I’m just throwing down random ideas, rather than necessarily keeping on a constant train of thought.
It’s an interesting way to work. It’s not a way that I used to work. And, funnily enough, when I dictate while I’m out walking, I actually write more “conventionally” because I’llget on a roll and I’ll start to write an actual whole scene. When I’m at my desk dictating, oftentimes another idea pops into my head because of something I’ve just seen on the computer and I’ll go off on a tangent with that. And I know there are writers who would gasp in horror at the idea that you would write with all this going on around you, but I think that’s the difference between the initial writing and the later edits. I would find it impossible to edit and rewrite that way; for the later drafts, I have to work from hard copy and the computer has to be shut off.
But it’s the initial phase that I’m interested in, and that initial phase of creation has certainly changed radically for writers in recent times and I think will continue to do so.
Derek Flynn is an Irish writer and musician. He’s been published in a number of publications, including The Irish Times, and was First Runner-Up in the 2011 J. G. Farrell Award for Best Novel-In-Progress. His writing/music blog – ‘Rant, with Occasional Music’ – can be found here:http://derekflynn.wordpress.comand on Twitter, he can be found here: http://twitter.com/#!/derekf03
One of my Triberr friends who came to my call is Corinne O’Flynn, another Mighty Writer Warrior. Beyond that, though, I got to know Corinne as a writer during the Rules of Three Blogfest I co-hosted in October 2011.
A pretty darn good writer, as she was the winner of our first blogfest, garnering the votes and admiration of her fellow #REN3 writers. Well deserved, among some tough competition.
Her Guest Post echoes feelings I wrote about recently. GMTA! Enjoy!!
The Creativity Series Guest Post:
What Does Creativity Look Like?: Corinne O’Flynn
Whether you are staring down a blank sheet of paper and willing the pen to move, standing in front of a blank canvas wishing the brush would take over, crying over your keyboard and stark white monitor, or lamenting the cluttered space in your house and praying for a solution, we all use our creativity every single day.
In my handy dictionary, creativity is defined as the ability to create.
Create what?
Does creativity belong solely to the arts? Is it a matter of creating something beautiful, entertaining, or enlightening? I am not so sure about that. Does it require bringing something into being where there was nothing before?
I believe strongly that we humans are rather creative by nature. Not everyone can be a writer, nor everyone a painter, but everyone is creative.
As a writer, I am often asked where I come up with the ideas for my stories. I would love to reply that there is a fabulous process with thirteen intricate and specific steps which, if followed, will enable each and every one of you to generate fabulous story lines. But, that’s not the case-at least for me (if you do happen to have such a plan, please share it in the comments!). Yes, there is a creative process at work, but it is so very subjective and personal. What works for me will not likely work for someone else and vice versa.
As part of my work at Rowan Tree Foundation I write essays about my personal experience and thoughts on grief and loss. When I ask others to consider becoming a contributing writer and share about their own experiences, many shy away claiming a lack of creative ability. Now, you know I don’t believe it’s possible since I’ve already stated that we are all creative.
So what is it?
Creativity requires courage. There is risk involved in creating something that you intend to share. Putting your heart into creating something and then placing it on display puts you at risk. It is a risk many people are not comfortable taking.
What many people fail to see, and therefore fail to give themselves credit for, is the creativity that they put to use on a daily basis. Some are indeed working on things that are considered mainstream creative endeavors like writing, singing, composing, and art to name a few. But what about the everyday person trying to organize a cluttered space in their home so they can make the space ready for a new use? What about the businessperson who needs to figure out a solution to a budget crisis without letting any employees go? What about the parent whose children need to be in five places at once and there is only one car?
Creativity takes many forms, and they are not always what we think of as conventionally creative things. It’s important to acknowledge your personal creativity even when you’re applying it to mundane tasks. If more of us did this, I believe we’d discover how very creative we all are.
In what ways are you creative in your daily life?
Bio:
Corinne loves to write about fictional dark and fantastical things. You can find her on her blog and on twitter @CorinneOFlynn
“This week, Kurt Andersen asks: can computers make art? And if so, when? Will it be any good? We’ll meet a program named AARON that’s been painting for nearly 40 years, a filmmaker who replaced her editor with an algorithm, and professor who thinks what computers need is more Shakespeare.
It’s 4pm, and I’m in my car. I put on WYNC, the local NPR station, and the program Studio 360 begins. The question that starts the show is “Are Computers Creative?”, and the first thing you hear is about a computer named Brutus that is writing a novel.
What?
Well, the creator of Brutus goes on to say that all Brutus is doing, through its algorithms and pathways and thingamajigs is a copy of what he and the other programmers have, well, programmed it to do. It’s aping the apes, so to speak.
Then there is the inventor of The Creativity Machine, Stephen L. Thaler, Ph.D. An A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) computer that he states that yes, machines CAN be original and creative, and they have the machine to prove it. They just send a jumbled signal through, and it produces music and more.
Then there is AARON above, that has been painting for almost 40 years (photo on the linked page); a machine named Darci that judges Art, and…well, the program link is above. Just click on the title and it will take you to the Studio 360 page. Well worth the listen.
bornstoryteller 