15*15 Creativity Exercise Series — 1

You Will Now Create 15 Stories Using These Intriguing First Sentences

I am very excited to start a series of new adventures and challenges I have designed for you.

The goal of these challenges is to help you expand your imagination and exercise your muscles of creativity.

My promise: I will be publishing 15 challenges in the following 15 days.

Let me tell you a secret: These challenges are not ready. So, my challenge will be to develop them every day in real-time in the next two weeks. I will publish each of these challenges in Illumination for the next 15 days.

Your challenge will be to implement them. If you want to develop each challenge in detail, you will need about one hour to 1.5 hours (depending on how deep you want to dive).

Are you ready?

I kickstart this series by proposing to you the first challenge.

Your Challenge: Create 15 short stories

Using the prompts as your first sentences, please write 15 short stories.

Your mind will resist this idea at first: “This is too much work!”

However, you will be rewarded if you can stick with the exercise and keep writing.

If you do not have the will or time to write them all, you can choose just 3 or 5 among them. It is up to you.

Still, try to write all of these stories, if you can.

How will you do this? Here are my suggestions:

1. You do not need to aim for good stories. You just need to write a minimum viable story.

2. Do not judge or evaluate your stories. Just keep writing.

3. Your job is to use the first sentence as your inspiration and continue the story without too much thinking.

4. Just keep writing for about 5–6 minutes to create a story. Do not stop writing.

5. If you are stuck, come back to your prompt (first sentence). This will be your anchor phrase and you can repeat and re-write it.

6. Imagine that your hands have their own imagination and trust them. Keep your hands moving. Do not think too hard.

7. Try to write and finish each story. Make it fast and practical. Do not aim for perfect stories. Good enough is fine.

8. Remember: You are doing this just to have fun. This is meant to be for fun. Just play and mess around. Improvise. Try to surprise yourself and your brain.

Are you ready for the challenge?

Using the prompt in each box as your first sentence, and start with that sentence. Write your story in 5 minutes or so.

Please repeat the process for all boxes — you will write 15 short stories in total.

We benefit a lot from exercising our creative muscles.

If you have done the exercise above, you will have strengthened your creative muscles 15 times!

We need to give our brain 15 creative challenges every day.

If we make this a habit, the process will help us rewire our brains to be more open to creativity.

If you are interested, feel free to follow me for the next 15 days.

Each day, you will be involved in 15 small challenges.

In the end, I hope we will emerge from this process stronger and more creative.

See you in the second episode of this journey tomorrow.

I hope we can create and write the stories of our lives.

Fahri

Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.