Five minutes of creative work every day

How to train your creativity

I love writing, as I have said many times and I want to be a creative person, as I have also said even more often.

I have written lots of stories over the years and I have a feeling that we should try creative writing as a writer as well as ‘article writing’. However, I don’t think I was born to be creative. I believe that you can train your creativity at some point.

I have written before about producing numbers of creative works;

I think that as a creator we should try to create as many creations as possible, although you cannot ignore the quality of each one. However, this morning the idea which came to my head was around the frequency of creativity.

When I started blogging (in Japanese), someone said that you should try to post a story every day. The quality is important, but the frequency is also critical as well.

After I started writing Haiku in English, I felt that my inspiration is too capricious to expect. It is like a little wild bird. Once you find it, you don’t want to let it go.

So once I grabbed my creative moment, I tried to create as many poems as possible. I don’t know about other poets, but I thought that I had to squeeze my creativity to write decent poems when it comes to me because you don’t know when it will come back again.

Therefore, I wrote a few poems including Haiku and Tanka poetry in one day, and on the other days, I write none. However, I started feeling they were like ‘debts of creativity’. If you have a creative moment or minutes once every week, you have to have create things for a week ahead within that moment. That’s a strange idea. That is not what I want to be like.

Now I want to try to have a creative time every day; five or ten minutes. It may be like a meditation practice, although I have never tried meditation yet.

I want my ‘creative minutes’ as a part of my routine when I can write poems or I can sink myself in deep thoughts.

Life is an accumulation of days. I hope that everyday creative practice will make me a more creative person.

HANA is a Japanese born writer who writes stories and poems in both English and Japanese. If you are an English reader, you can follow her English publications, ‘Etude of Creativity (poetry, haiku, fiction)’ and ‘Japanese Writer (blogs & essays)’ or on Twitter.

All stories written by HANA are here (a list in English).