Stop and Dream: Creative Exercises: the start

Creativity is something that's becoming more and more valuable and necessary in this world. If you look at a lot of the up and coming or, already successful companies right now, they're all about the creative. Everything wants to be different, have a different approach, inspire, break out of the mold, etc etc etc.

Even the most creative people, however, can benefit from exercising their creativity. We find inspiration in our world, in other people, in random thoughts. Basically, I wanted to start a little thing of creative exercises once in a while. If you feel up to it, join in when you want! Would love to see how other people handle them, but this is just a way for me to make myself stretch those muscles.

So for today, the exercise is as follows:

1. Find three photographs or illustrations that draw out an emotional response from you.

Yes. Find them before you move on or it messes the whole thing up a bit!

2. Next, come up with 2 nouns and 3 adjectives that fit with each, so you'll end up with 6 nouns and 9 adjectives total.

3. Finally, write a descriptive, colorful paragraph that uses those 6 nouns and 9 adjectives (and other ones you put in there). It can be in any style you want. It can be about anything you want. It can be as abstract or concrete, as real-life or fictional as you want. It's all about just writing what's inside, but with a few parameters.

So...
Here's mine:

Img 1:

Nouns: octagon, architecture

Adjectives: warm, dreamy, reminiscent

Img 2:

Nouns: decay, concrete

Adjectives: forgotten, eerie, abandoned

Img 3:

Nouns: highways, bridge

Adjectives: intertwined, directional, lush

Through the gentle, silent breeze, I thought I heard something. What, though? I couldn't quite make it out. Like the hum of a highway, the soft braided sounds were intertwining with my thoughts, creating a lush breeding ground of dreamy ideas that left me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. I guess it doesn't matter what, concretely, was being said; what forgotten ideas were trying to make their way back into the real world. All that mattered was the eerie feeling that crept over my chilled skin. Patterns and colors and shapes–blue, gold, striped, purple, triangles, spotted, octagons–they fluttered before my eyes like the hephalump and woozle scene in Winnie the Poo. What deranged artist had constructed the architecture of this odd vision? What directional force was drawing out such visual ideas? On what decaying bridge were they abandoned, tossed to the mercy of the directional force of the wind? The wind that is oddly reminiscent of that which dances through my hair and tickles my eyelashes at this very moment? The wind that is whispering to me something I can't quite discern.

And there you have it!