Love Letters: A KTC Creative Writing Challenge

1. Welcome + Introduction: welcome to love letters, a class in my kicked, the cobweb Siris of creative writing challenges to spark ideas and inspiration. Hello, I'm Christi Chatterbox Christie. As most people know me online, I am a professional writer and editor and creative coach. I love to make mounds and verbs play nicely together, and I've been doing it most of my life professionally, probably for the last two decades. One thing I love to do is champion creatives and helping us find and pursue what sets our souls on fire. And that's what I'm doing here on skill share. I am so happy to bring you my kick, the cobwebs, Siris of creative challenges to help spark ideas, inspiration and keep the creative juices flowing. I hope that you'll find this Siri's fun as it is challenging, and maybe you'll use these exercises in your everyday creative practice. It happens to all of us. Every creator experience is a dry spell when we're practicing our craft. That tsunami of creativity has reduced itself to nothing more than a toilet ripple. It feels less like creative block and more like creative Berlin Wall. Over the years I've discovered, and mostly by accident unique ways to cleanse my creative palette, to kick those cobwebs and really tap into my surroundings in my senses. For creative inspiration, I've turned these happy little accidents into a series of classes so I can share my techniques with all creators at any stage of their craft. While this class involves a creative writing challenge, you don't have to be a writer to benefit from the technique. This class is for you if you're a creator working on a project, but that once full well of ideas has run completely dry. This is a great exercise for copy writers and poets, and you'll understand why, in just a few, this class is also for you if you're just starting your creative practice and you need a little bit of a boost. Or maybe you're just curious about different ways to find and keep inspiration. You can even benefit from this class if you're not currently experiencing any creative blocks. But you'd like to be ready to kick those cobwebs when you dio when we need inspiration for writing, we rarely look to the actual words to find it, and that's exactly what we're going to do in this class plus. You'll also expand your vocabulary, as you'll most likely discover some new words in this challenge. Get ready to amplify your liberation skills and become a master of metaphors. Great skills for writing, ad copy or catchy headlines or poetry. You'll find more creative ways to use common and familiar words. Ultimately, you'll develop a deeper appreciation for words and the letters that make them. As they say, life begins outside your comfort zone. We'll sodas, creativity. So I'm really hoping that these exercises will help you stretch beyond the boundaries of your regular creative practice. Are you ready? Let's go. 2. The Inspiration: since this exercise stems from something that I do in my personal creative practice, I always like to share the inspiration behind it. Ah, the golden age of Google. Plus anybody remember Google. Plus, I used to use it religiously. It was my happy place I loved how I could have different circles of friends, for different reasons, for different interests. And I had a writer circle people who were either writers themselves or just interested in writing or just kind of hung around me because I inspired them to write Well, I'm still in mourning for Google. Plus, I wish it was back anyway. Moving on one of my writers circles, members challenged me to write a post each day, using as many words with one letter of the alphabet one letter per day, basically a 26 day challenge. There was no word count, no rules other than to see if I would actually do it. For every single letter of the alphabet, I let my followers know what I was doing, and by the time I got the letter D, I had company others who were trying their hand at this game. It isn't as easy as it sounds, and there were days I wanted to skip due to the degree of letter difficulty. This challenge made the dictionary and a thesaurus my best friends. I've posted a few of my favorites from the original challenge in my class project. So for this love letters, I've taken the original concept and added a few twists to make it a little bit more interesting. 3. The Project: What You Need: to complete the love letters challenge, you're gonna need a few things. First, you're going to need your favorite writing tools, either electronic or analog. I think it's great to try to complete this challenge, writing by hand in a journal or on loose leaf paper, whichever you're comfortable with. But I totally get the need to type a swell. So which ever method makes you feel the most comfortable? Also, you want a good writing environment, good lighting. You want to be seated comfortably. Ah, place where you can really relax and get into this exercise. You also want to give yourself enough time. I recommend at least 20 minutes. But you know, if you're just grabbing a few seconds during a coffee break or on your lunch break, totally understand. But 20 minutes is a good gauge. If you can give yourself that much time, I'd say at the minimum 10 but twenties a good gauge. You will need to download our inspiration list from the class resource is and have access to the Internet. Finally, you will need your mind and your creative spirit open and ready to receive inspiration. Once you have all those things, you are ready to start the love letters challenge 4. The Project: Directions: okay. If you have everything that you need, let's gather these muses and start this love letters Challenge. Step one. Pick a number from 1 to 26. Got it. Great step to find your letter. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. So the letter that corresponds with the number you just chose is your letter for this challenge. For example, A is number one be to three C and so one in someone until you get to see which is number 26 . So whatever letter you chose Well, whatever number you chose corresponds with that letter. And that is your letter for this challenge. Step three, find your subject on the inspiration list. Unlike the original version of this challenge, you will actually have a prompt to start from the inspiration list that you downloaded from the class. Resource is has 26 subjects. Choose the subject that corresponds to the number of your letter. Simple enough. Great. Step four, right, Right. About your subject using as many words as you can, starting with the letter that you chose or that was kind of randomly chosen for you. Based upon the number that you chose, I said just a minimum of five sentences. But right, as much as you can write, whatever comes to you, write what you think, right? What you feel just whatever comes to mind. Write it down and just keep writing until the words and thoughts stop coming. Okay, so you might be having a little trouble with this challenge. I totally get it. I mean, you're staring at the letter, and you're trying to think of words to go along with the inspiration subject, and you're just dumped. Well, here's a big hint. Make the thesaurus and the dictionary your new best friends. I promise you it will help you out in tremendous ways and also help you to learn a lot more words and phrases. So write the word that you want to use, then used at the saurus to look up synonyms that start with your letter or if you have a word, starting with your letter that you want to use, but you're not quite sure if it's in the right context. Use the dictionary to make sure the definition fits, or maybe you can use it to find ways to do a play on words. Make it really creative and interesting, but don't stress out over being stopped. There are ways to get over it. And I promise you the dictionary and a thesaurus are your best defense. Now I'm not a big fan of rules. I'm a rebel that way, especially when it comes to writing. Because I think a lot and a lot of ways we can make up our own rules other than grammar and punctuation and things like that, obviously. But I only have three rules for this challenge. The 1st 1 is to not cheat. And what I mean by that is if you get a letter that you're not really happy with, or probably with the inspiration subjects is really probably where you're going toe feel more compelled to cheat. And that's changing before you get started. This is meant to stretch you beyond your usual comfort zone off creativity. So stick with the letter that you get stick with the inspiration subject that you get work through it. This is meant to challenge you. The second rule conjunction junctions have no functions, and I am not a singer. But if you remember that little schoolhouse rock jingle, you know what conjunctions are, and if but or things like that, they don't count. So if your letter is a and does not count as one of your work, one of the words that go along with this challenge so don't of litter up a beautiful piece of prose with a bunch of filler words to try to to try to ah, have more words with the letter if you understand what I mean, unless it it plays a role in what you're writing, and I think as you get going, you'll understand what I mean by that. The third rule is Do not edit or censor at first, and I say at first because I think if it becomes something that you may want to share, you had fun with it and you want to share it. Um, you may want to edit it later, but I say while you're working on it while you're working through it while you are challenging yourself in stretching yourself and your creativity just right, don't worry about how it sounds. Don't go back and rewrite sentences over and over again. Just get it down first, play with it and then you can edit make it pretty if it is something that you want to share publicly. So Onley three rules 5. Challenge Yourself: since. The idea is to spark ideas and inspiration and to stretch your imagination beyond your creative comfort zone. Here some ways to challenge yourself during this exercise. One thing you can do is randomly select your inspiration subject. Originally, you chose a number from 1 to 26 your letter and inspirations subject corresponded to that number this time. Picked two numbers, one for the letter and a separate one for the inspiration subject and see how that gets your creative juice flowing. Another way to challenge yourself is to set a timer to see how much you can write in a specific window of time. This can also help you create a disciplined writing habit. Here's where you can get really creative, ditch the inspiration list and use your letter to write an actual love letter. You can read it to a person or for fun, right it to the letter itself. I'd love to see someone do that. That would be really fun. Last but not least, and keeping with the tradition of the original challenge I did on Google, plus dare to do this exercise for 26 days straight, like timing yourself, it could start you on a solid path to a consistent creative practice 6. Final Thoughts: Well, how did it go? How did you do with the letters and the inspiration? Was it easy or did you find it difficult? Did you consult with the saurus in the dictionary a lot? I'd love to know how this project went for you. That it's for creativity. For you. Did it give you some inspiration? Did it pull out of you some talents with words that you never knew that you had before? I'd love to get your feedback as well. A see your projects. I would love to read what you all came up with. And, um, how you used the words and the inspiration that you were given. Please consider chairing your project. I know it's a little difficult. Sometimes you worry about Oh, I don't know how this sounds. This seems silly. I didn't write a whole lot. I on Lee wrote a few sentences. I couldn't come up with anything. The beauty of this is you have this class for ever, or as long as you have your skills here membership so you can step away for a while. Think about it. Play with the word about playing with the words. Play with the letter play with e inspiration, Get outside yourself for a little bit and come back and try it again and again and again and again. And hopefully this will become least. The idea of playing with words this way becomes a regular exercise in your creative practice to kind of get the creative juices flowing. But challenging yourself to not just have the regular go to words that you may use all the time and get you to branch out with vocabulary. So I really would love to see what you will come up with and please feel free to ask questions, comment on other people's projects. This is a community I want to help inspire and and cultivate a creative community of like minded folks that want to share and be inspired by others as well as just commiserating whenever we have. You know, hard times on coming up with ideas. So this is another reason why sharing your project is very important. Um, both very important or is really cool because you may get some ideas from another person and we're all in this together. So please consider sharing your project. I'd love to see it if you have any questions or you just want to get a conversation with your fellow students and with me going, just click that community tab in our in our class and start a discussion. I'd love to get some dialogue going just about anything of about your creative process. Let's have some fun with this, Okay? If you like kicking the cobwebs with this class of my creative Siri's, there's more where this came from. Be sure to follow me on skill share for more fun ways to spark creative inspiration. See you next time.