Welcome to the fifth of our Creative Challenges. We’ve focused on writing about identities in our first week of Creative Challenges: WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 5 gets you exploring the identity that means the most to you.
Guidance: For the next 20 minutes, use whatever method you like – thoughts and ideas, mind maps, diagrams or sketches, a sample of script, prose, poetry – as you prepare a creative piece, about:
The identity you’re most proud to have, and how it inspires you in life.
- As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to what matters to you in writing.
- Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC5”. Then reflect on this experience and what it has taught you about you and your writing: what comes naturally to you, which aspects were easy and difficult, and the subjects, angles and attitudes that you like to focus your writing on.
- Share online if you like using the hashtag #100DayCC5 to compare to other people’s experiences and support each other, or submit to our Academy Lite if you’re a subscriber!
When you complete the Challenge – or if you get completely stuck – then look at the Feedback below!
Feedback:
It’s important to succeeding as a writer, that you know who YOU are and what distinguishes you from others who are similar but subtly different from you. Lots of people around us all are proud to be mothers, sports team fans, Christians and so on. But as a writer you should always look for a distinctive angle to take, even when describing yourself in familiar terms like this. As with so much in writing, it’s not about WHAT you say, it’s about HOW you say it. What is unique to you about a widespread identity you share with others, such as mother, Christian, etc? Hopefully you found some angles, or styles of telling, to bring this to life and reinspire others who think they already know everything they need to about it.
The trickiest identity to write about in this context is ‘writer’ or ‘screenwriter’, because it’s partly self-evident from the fact you’re here doing this challenge, and also because you might have a natural reticence about it, or be wary about defining yourself and your writing in too limited a way. But do try to look into yourself to identify what’s distinctive about your experience of being a writer, the things you choose to write about, and how you write about them. It’s vital to define yourself and your writing in an interesting and clear way, if you want someone to then actually look at the writing you want them to! We’ll take that aspect further in the next Creative Challenge.
General tips and feedback:
Many writers, naturally, don’t find it easy to be creative ‘on tap’ – especially for work that they didn’t set themselves. But to write professionally, you will usually need to meet deadlines and requirements, that can’t be put off, for briefs you didn’t choose for yourself: even if you’re ill or feeling down, you’ll usually have to just find a way through, and get the results that are needed, to the quality that’s necessary. So the WriteMovies Creative Challenges are designed to help you find ways around the crucial issues of ‘block’.
We do this by setting a (deceptively!) simple brief, and encouraging you to use a variety of methods, approaches and creative products in order to find ways around it, and generate some kind of outcomes that might be useful to you in the future. Whatever state your mind and mood are in – energetic or tired, stimulated or bored, motivated or disengaged, etc – there are different ‘modes’ of creative productivity which you can engage, to make the best of it: editing your work if you can’t write, making notes if you can’t generate script, etc. Try a mix of methods to make the most of activities such as the Creative Challenges, especially anytime you get stuck: just keep adding notes, sketches etc freely, you can decide later whether any of them are useful! Also note that the brief is to ‘prepare’ a creative work – not to actually make it straight away, before you feel ready to! But if you’ve come away from this with a passage of prose or script or even poetry, well done!
Hopefully this activity will have shown you the potential value of our Creative Challenges, and the benefits of making a routine to complete them, and persisting with it day by day to gradually improve all aspects of your writing and to develop solutions to ‘block’, that you will become more and more proficient with over time. We recommend that you commit to fulfilling the 100-Day Creative Challenges, sharing your outputs to gain the support and feedback of other writers working on the same activities, and if you’d like expert daily feedback from us on this and much more, additional material, subscribe to the WriteMovies Academy Lite now!