Our environment has a profound impact on our capacity for creative thought. Studies show that gentle sensory stimulation meaningfully boosts divergent thinking and idea generation. A short walk, an hour in a park, or a lively conversation at a forum can provide the cognitive spark needed to unlock new ideas. Sustain that stimulation over three weeks or more, however, and the effects are even deeper, with measurable changes in brain plasticity.
But I know, as someone who lives in a concrete jungle and who works long hours, how hard it can be to access quality time off, nature, and the wonderful stimulation of visiting a new place. Time, greenery, and community are basic preconditions for thriving – for having meaningful social connections, curiosity, and a sense of wonder, but they remain limited for many people. So, it is important to stress how harmful the global inequalities in green space are, for example, as well as the cognitive toll of exploitative factory and office work, isolation, and the ongoing stress from constant violence or insecure access to water.
Ironically, long term, it helps to have that deep fascination with life in order to be motivated to fight for humanity and the planet. Fascination and wonder is to be in love with the world, a love we then express through our participation in different projects, movements and battles for justice. Fascination and curiosity are also powerful weapons against the apathy of tolerance for what is unfair, and the normalisation of cruelty and violence in its many forms. Fascinated, we remain sensitive, caring, and interested, rather than numbed.
For the short term, here are some exercises to provoke fascination and weave it into your writing.
- Prepare your mind: Fascination requires openness, so try to prepare your mind first. If you have the space or time, go for a walk (the act of walking, indoors or outside, increases creativity and the free flow of ideas, but doing it outside provides extra, positive stimulation), or put on some music and just enjoy it for a while. Worst case scenario, watch 10 minutes of a nature video where clouds are slowly drifting and changing shape or rain is hitting leaves. This alone has measurable cognitive benefits, leveraging “soft fascination” (restful, gentle captivation) and helping you to focus while enhancing your mood.
- Then do one, or multiple of the following:
- Make the mundane interesting: List four mundane things. Try to go beyond things around the house like walls or carpet, to the mundane in life, like the trip to work, filing taxes or brushing your teeth. Then describe at least three fascinating things about each item. Find the miracle, the amazing, the beauty in the mundane thing. Note how, when you brush your teeth, your mind always drifts to tomorrow, as though the nightly act of cleaning were a prompt for future planning. Or how filing taxes stirs up anger and your heart throbs. It is interesting how that beating has a different feel to it than the quickened heart beat of excitement. Or how varied nature’s textures are, how reliable the sea is.
- Indulge in obsession: Identify something wonderful you are obsessed with. It may be a person, a memory, a topic like the ethics of photography, an author, or an activity like hiking. Healthy obsessions are really just strong passions and fascinations, so indulge. If it is something visual, go online and save a tonne of photos related to it. If it is something more like a certain writer or an intellectual topics, collect quotes from or about them. But, collect – notes, memories, texts, images. And then, while you are in this state of mind of being fascinated by the topic, write. Do 10 minutes of free writing (raw, unfiltered, uncontrolled), and if something great comes up, feel free to extend that into other projects (your stories, art, diary, Substack article etc).
- Appreciate: Find a piece of less-known or unknown art. One that hasn’t been over-analysed already. Perhaps look for “surreal art” or “nature art” or “modern Egyptian art” or similar topics. Then list at least 10 things you really like about it. No need to be clever, no one will read this. Perhaps you like the colours, or the way the shadows are painted roughly, or the details in the dog’s eyes. Then take one or two of these rich details, leave the painting, and allow them to become your new writing prompt – a seed for more writing.
For more writing exercises, my book is available: Resistance Words – A creative writing toolkit for healing, disrupting injustice, and for hope. Also check out my latest literary novel, The Eyes of the Earth.
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