Budweiser Clydesdales<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI like animals; they can be very engaging.\u00a0 Perhaps using the idea of an animal as a beast of burden helping us in our task by pulling a load.\u00a0 Oxen?\u00a0 No! Horses are heart warming;\u00a0 horses and a wagon.\u00a0 The old Budweiser commercials with their Clydesdales came to mind.\u00a0 I did not get very far before I realized that I don\u2019t know enough about training horses to make this workable.<\/p>\n
The Third Run<\/h2>\n
Even if I were willing to invest hours into researching horse training methods, would my readers relate easily?\u00a0 Would the analogy make sense: maybe not.\u00a0 I needed something more familiar to my readers and myself. Dogs.\u00a0 I know dogs, most everyone can relate to dogs. What do dogs pull or carry?\u00a0 Dogsled?\u00a0 A team of dogs: Muse, Research, Prose and Grammar all must be taught to work together if the sled is to reach its destination?<\/p>\n
No; still too unfamiliar and too complicated for a 500-600 word post.\u00a0 What then?\u00a0 Something simpler, and more engaging.\u00a0 One dog.\u00a0 Training one dog to do\u2026 tricks?\u00a0 A PUPPY! Everyone loves puppies.\u00a0 A puppy can be both heartwarming and exasperating as you try to form it into a suitable companion\u2026 perfect!<\/p>\n
The Home Run<\/h2>\n
Now that I had a workable premise it was just a matter of selecting points around which to build the analogy.\u00a0 I tried several, cut a couple, tweaked the others and in the end settled on Housebreaking, Leash Training, Training to Come and Playtime, using a puppy named Muse.\u00a0 I was pretty happy with the result.\u00a0 Handed it off to my editor for a quick review, she tweaked it just a bit and I sent it to Terre.\u00a0 She said, \u201cAllan, this is outstanding! I was smiling, engaged and intrigued from start to finish. Thank you, it’s going to be a hit :)\u201d<\/p>\n
Not a Cakewalk<\/h1>\n
This article went through several iterations before being sent off to the publisher, and it changed completely from my initial vision.\u00a0 But that is how creativity works sometimes.\u00a0 Sometimes genius falls on us from the sky, other times we must mine it out a shovelful at a time, trying different veins before we strike pay-dirt.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d like to read the finished piece, click through to Training Creativity<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhat about you: what processes does your muse use to infuse your writings with imagination?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently there has been a good deal of discussion going on about creativity: what it is, where it comes from, how it works, and how to get it to work better for you. Many articles have been written on how to encourage your imagination, how to feed your muse. As writers we depend on our … Continue reading “The Mechanics of Creativity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[41,45,46],"class_list":["post-2953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-muse","tag-creativity","tag-imagination","tag-muse-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2953"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21612,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2953\/revisions\/21612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7150\/6413667021_46a59d03a1_o_d.jpg\" "\\"Tigger")
In this article I\u2019m not going to try to tell you how to build up your creative muscle, I\u2019m going to do an analytical breakdown of the creative process I went through to write my last blog post.\u00a0 I\u2019ll preface it by saying that this is not the process I use all the time: sometimes an article just springs into my mind, fully written, my only task is to record it before the words fade from my mind.\u00a0 Often these Inspired Writings occur at the most inopportune times: like 3:00 am.\u00a0 If I am able to ignore the call and go back to sleep I\u2019ll remember that I had a wonderful idea, but won\u2019t remember anything more about it.\u00a0 Opportunity lost!\u00a0 <\/p>\n![\"teamwork,](\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7159\/6756552289_98503762ea_m_d.jpg\" "\\"Budweiser")