6 Ways You Can Develop Your Creativity

I love the creative mind! I love to read books in most genres and by many authors. In the last couple of weeks I’ve read three Agatha Christie novels, featuring Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence, and one stand alone called ‘They came to Baghdad’ – nothing changes…

I have three of my own self-published books featuring Fairy Hanny, available on Amazon, though I will be moving them somewhere else soon; I am fed up with Amercan Oligarchs taking control of the media.

So this week I will have some thoughts on creativity.

Do you keep a journal?

Having a creative mindset can help propel you forward both in your career and your personal life. This reason is why it can be so disheartening when you struggle to develop your creativity. Below are six ways you can develop your creativity to be more successful in life.

  1. Build Your Confidence

Often creativity is stifled when you are afraid or embarrassed to tell others what you are thinking. A huge part of creativity is sharing and further developing your ideas with others. This is why you should work to build your self-confidence if you want to develop your creativity.

  • Have Creative Time

If your schedule is so full of activities that you don’t have time to sit and think or time to create, of course, you won’t be creative! Help develop your creativity by setting aside time each day to be creative.

  • Brainstorm

Brainstorming is a great idea to get your creative juices flowing. You can brainstorm anything, from latest ideas for your free time, new date ideas or even how you want your dream home to look—the sky is the limit! Sit down and start filling that paper with ideas!

  • Try New Things

Nothing gets creative juices flowing quite like trying something new. Is there a class at the gym you have always wanted to take? Go for it! Or maybe you want to vacation somewhere new? That’s an idea too! Anything that will make you step out of your comfort zone is great for your creativity.

  • Spend Time In Nature

Nature is one of the best ways to get inspired and start feeling creative for free. Take some time each week and sit in nature or go for a walk after work each day. You’ll be surprised at the ideas you produce while just being outside.

  • Journal

If you want to develop your creativity, you should consider journaling regularly. Keeping a journal helps your thoughts to flow and helps you overcome problems and think more creatively. Try to write a journal for 5-10 minutes each day.

Wherever you may be in life with your creative journey, there is bound to be something on this list that sparks your creativity. You don’t have to use all these things to help your creativity develop, but if you manage to incorporate them all into your life, you may just be surprised at how easy being creative is! So don’t hesitate and start developing your creativity today!

Swifty’s diet tips…have a great weekend

Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com
  1. Wear big clothes.
  2. Eat less.
  3. Don’t eat burnt fish!
  4. Bacon is sane.
  5. Eat banana skin so nobody falls over.
  6. Kale looks good on a model railway.
  7. A steak tastes better and is less chewy than a stake.
  8. Fairy cakes should be ordered by Gnomes.
  9. Fried lettuce burns
  10. Elephants should be consumed one piece at a time.
  11. Eating shellfish is selfish.
  12. It is difficult to follow a recipe in the dark
  13. Recipe books make great door stops.
  14. Celery sticks, so be careful.
  15. Voiding your bowels before a meal is best done in a lavatory.
  16. Chicken is a good substitute for coward.
  17. Oranges and Lemons add colour to a religious stoning.
  18. Earl Grey and Cannabis make a lovely High Tea.
  19. Donuts should be devoured via the end of the alimentary canal.
  20. Raspberries are a great dish for liars.
  21. Raspberry Pi is not edible, even when served with microchips.

United Nations Translators on strike over Douglas slur- we’ll make him eat his words!

An almighty row has erupted at the United Nations Headquarters in New York over an alleged slur on the professionalism of Translators and Interpreters by Hollywood superstar Michael Douglas. Staff are incensed by the suggestion that their activities can cause throat cancer.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

“Oui!” declared Marcel Sponge, 27, head of the Belgian translation team. “Sometimes in our line of work we become involved in throat and larynx gymnastics, such as having to sound like we are about to spit when speaking German. And occasionally we have to pull funny faces and sound angry, like when speaking Mandarin. But none of this can be said to cause throat cancer!” he added defiantly.

Douglas, 68, was unrepentant: “Greed is good,” he is quoted as saying.

“At my age I look forward to being 69,” he added with a wink.

Douglas is no stranger to controversy, having married and actress 25 years younger than himself, while at the same time he was much older than her. However so far this has not caused any problems and it is statistically quite common for couples to be different ages.

Michael Douglas comes from the well known Hollywood celebrity family, the Douglas’s. As an actor in his own right he rose to prominence in such movies as Romancing the Nile Jewels, The Wall Street and Basic in Stink. More recently he supplied the voice of Gordon the Gecko in Madagascar 17 and played the outrageous Pianist Liberace who allegedly had a face like a decorator’s radio. His father Kirk Douglas, 96, shot to fame as Spartacus and took further lead roles in The Vikings, The Normans and The Stevens. Meanwhile Brother Jack took the Romantic lead in later Carry On films, notably as Dick the Twitcher in Carry On Looking for Birds.

However UN translators are far from impressed by this pedigree.

“He’s only an actor,” stated Matsumoro Matsumoto, 31, a member of the British delegation.

Meanwhile the Head of Security at the UN HQ General (retd.) Hank O’Hare, 72, told us, “If these guys don’t get back to work there will be all hell to pay. Without them in place Politicians will have to learn to talk to each other – that would be a disaster and would seriously affect US Arms sales.”

A Joint statement issued by the Cancer Research Society and the BBC stated; “Michael Douglas has suggested a link between throat cancer and cunnilingus. This has nothing to do with old jokes from the BBC.”

[Of course it’s a spoof!!!!]

Things not to miss when writing articles.

I love to write; articles, short stories, poems, book reviews, novels or news reports. It’s great fun to see your own work in print and always a bous if you can get some income from it.

In this short note I want to think about some key points that should be included if you want your article to be noticed.

Photo by Vlad Cheu021ban on Pexels.com
  1. Love it! I believe this is an essential – have passion for what you’re writing. There are two reasons for this. Firstly is that it is so much easier to write when you’re writing abut something you enjoy. Do you have a blog? Is it filled with things that keep you happy? Second is that readers can generally tell if you’re writing from the heart – passion comes across! I believe that this is the core to all writing – love it and enjoy it. Even when you have an assigned piece of writing – remember you promised your friend you’d do a piece for him – do it from a point of enjoyment. This can mean putting humour into the article which can be succesful if you know how to tell a joke; if you don’t then forget it!
  2. Grab a snappy title. Keep it short and have a biof mystery in it. Make people want to read it. When I was a research Physicist I had to read so many scientific papers that it made my eyes bleed! The content was often excellent but the titles… Having this experience led me to a fun way to get school students to write Science papers; I would get them to write up their report as though they were a sensationalist journalist! Great stuff – and it inspired them to study Science further.
Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

3.Lists. Everybody loves a list. How often do you click the link on a website when it says ’10 ways to see if you have the right partner’ or ‘7 ways to boost your sales’ or ‘5 ways to meet more girls/boys’; or ’50 ways to leave your lover’ as Paul Simon said. (Who is singing this in their head right now?)

  1. What is hot? Articles on current topics will get noticed. It could be about the latest fad in food, fashion, music or Science! Be careful though as these articles generally have a short shelf lfe.
  2. Paragraphs. Keep it short – people skim read and it’s easier!

Write some more but enjoy it first!

It’s all about the words, don’t worry!

10 Authors who dealt with Rejection.

You and I love to write. It’s a special gift and a privelege we have creating story’s, sometimes just for ourselves, for our famils and friends. But we all reach the point when we believe in what we write and we want to see it published – and we’d also like to make money from our writing too!
There are many famous writer, old and new, who have gone from the personal writing to looking for publication only to be rejected. I think many of you reading this will have a few rejection letters yourself – if not get ready for some! I have a few myself and each time I get one I either take on board the positive criticsm or I reject it if it is just negative criticism!

Below, in no particular order, are ten well known authors who suffered their fair share of rejection. However they didn’t let it stop them – they kept going an eventually found fame and fortune from their writing. We should take heart from these examples and remember – success is not just about what you do but about the attitude and determination you have to suucceed.

Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com
  1. C.S. Lewis. Author of the Chronicles of Narnia, the most famous being The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis received more than 800 rejections before he sold anything. Next time you watch one of the movies just smile at his determination.
  2. Margaret Mitchell. Not an author that jumps into ones head easily – she wrote Gone With The Wind. An all time classic that was rejected by 25 publishers.
  3. Robert M. Pisig. The author of a modern classic much loved by undergraduate college students. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance took four years to write and was rejected 121 times!
  4. George Orwell. A personal favourite of mine as he worked at the local newspaper in my hometown and took his pen name from the River Orwell. His iconic book on Stalinist Russia Animal Farm was rejected repeatedly, one American publisher claiming that ‘animal stories don’t sell’.
  5. The Diary of Anne Frank was repeatedly rejected as many publishers felt it was of little interest to the general public. By 1998 this book had sold more than 25 million copies and remains a bestseller to this day.
  6. William Golding. The Lord of the Flies, an intriguing book about the lives and violence of young boys stranded on a tropical island, was rejected more than 20 times. The book has gone on to sell more than 14 million copies and the auther received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
  7. James Joyce. Possibly one of the most famous Irish writers of the 20th Century saw his novel Ulysses rejected over and over for being obscene.
  8. Jasper Fforde. Again a personal favourite. I have all of his Thursday Next novels and love the Nursery Crime series. Jasper collected 76 rejections before The Eyre Affair was accepted for publication.
  9. J.K. Rowling. Probably the best known rejected author of modern times. The first Harry Potter book was turned down by 12 major publishing houses before being accepted by Bloomsbury one of the smaller London publishers. Now each of her books has been turned into a movie, there are the books, computer games, merchandise etc.
  10. Frank Herbert. The best selling Science Fiction novel of all time was rejected 20 times. When accepted Dune sold so well that Herbert was contracted to write five more in the series.

So great books – how many have you actually read? – the common thread being rejection and perseverance. I have just finished the first draft of the manuscript for my second novel and will soon be reviewing and editing. then there will be the submissions and the rejections. Or maybe go straight to Kindle?

Meanwhile I keep my cash flowing by writing articles, short storys, poetry and tutoring. I feel priveleged, like I said at the start of this article, that I can spend time writing and helping others. I particularly like to write comedy – not one of the easiest genres but great fun. I sometimes burst out laughing when I read the things I’ve written.

Don’t ever get downhearted about your writing. Write for yourself when you can. Write articles to improve your skills (and get paid); write for your friends and family.

Just write!