So my friend and I completed our 14-day creative challenge.
I think it went well. Our biggest complaint was the time constraint…having to come up with something in such a short period of time. Full-time jobs, chores, family obligations all get in the way. But we pushed ourselves and did a little something every day.
One of the nice things for me was that I wrote a handful of poems. I started writing poetry when I was a kid and all through high school. Although, the poems I wrote during my teen years were more like lyrics to imaginary songs, but aren’t song lyrics just poems set to music? But yeah I wrote a variety of poetry, explored using new forms, new rhyme schemes. It was nice to get back to my roots.
Did I create anything worthwhile? Good question. I felt like I did okay. My friend felt like I did really well. Of course, I have a hard time taking positive feedback. Constructive criticism is great. Telling me I knocked it out of the park, well, I tend to get uncomfortable. Not sure why.
I really liked her output, as well. It was interesting to see that we went down similar paths on a couple of our projects. Three, to be precise. They weren’t exactly the same. That would be weird No, we simply had similar thoughts, which is kinda cool. Two very different people working in different mediums (artist/writer), yet we were still able to connect in a way. We also discussed, briefly, whether or not to post our work. We’ll see.
As for the challenge, we both felt it had a positive influence on our output and creative process, so we’re going to do it again. This time, however, we’re not going to push ourselves quite so hard. The next one will be an eight-week challenge and we’re going to only work off of one work or phrase per week Pull the prompt on a Monday and have until the following Sunday to create something. That’ll give us more time to think, to create, to produce something of substance.
And after that, maybe we’ll get really crazy and do another challenge where we’ll use each other’s work as our prompts. I think that’ll produce some interesting results.
RB