You may have noticed my Twitter account has been a lot more active recently. Up until October this year I was silent, but broke that silence when I wrote a tweet to commemorate a great man. I started writing many more tweets since then.
Now, for the next ninety days or so, I am writing a new tweet that is also a haiku everyday. If creativity is a muscle, the more I exercise it, the stronger it gets. These tweets/haiku don’t need to be “good”, they just need to be created everyday. (And if you know Lynda Barry’s work, you know that the questions “Is it good?” and “Does it suck?” cripple innate creativity.) By writing everyday, even seventeen syllables, I quiet my fears of creating “bad” or “sucky” work. The more I write and collect experience, the more I realize how I would revise even my “bad” work. As Brenda Ueland said,
“If you write a bad story, the way to make it better is to write three more. Then look at the first one. You will have grown in understanding, in honesty. You will know what to do to it. And to yourself.”
Moreover, the work stacks up. Seventeen syllables for ninety days makes 1530 syllables. At my old rate of a tweet a month, I’d have only produced 153 syllables in the time I spent silent. That’s a tenfold increase!
Creativity/
Inexhaustible when used/
Signature haiku,
Art
Arthur Hovinc's Port Manteau 