Writing for liberation exercise: Failure

Fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to creativity, and to many worthy things such as standing up for oneself or for a cause.

Yet making mistakes is part of the creative process: we usually need to get through about five bad ideas before our mind is open enough to a good, more creative idea. Meanwhile, education systems and much of society is structured around a fail/pass or fail/succeed binary, which goes against creativity and innovation, not to mention people’s sense of self worth, struggle, and process.

So in this creative writing for liberation exercise, lets fail on purpose. Take a traditional, typical writing exercise, and purposefully get it wrong. Then play a bit with what you’ve got and see where it takes you.

Here are some ideas of typical writing exercises, or pick your own: Randomly select three words from a book and use them in a story, in five minutes. Describe a character’s room purely through sense of smell and light. Write a story starting with “Who would have poisoned the old man’s dog”.

-Tamara