Living a creative life
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I want to say up front that I don't advocate gambling in the conventional sense. The house always wins, and there are no exceptions to this rule. However, I've been thinking this week about Kenny Rogers' 1978 song The Gambler (written by Don Schlitz in 1976). Specifically, the…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been thinking a lot lately about inciting incidents and the different ways they can be used in fiction. An inciting incident generally launches the primary conflict or action in a story. Joseph Campbell referred to the inciting incident as a call to action. Sometimes our characters seek…
Continue reading ➞ Insightful Examples of Inciting Incidents
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I watched a delightful documentary recently (as I write this, it's currently streaming on Netflix). Bathtubs Over Broadway introduces us to the world of corporate musicals from the perspective of former Late Show With David Letterman writer Steve Young. First, Young discovered the likes of The Bathrooms are…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I recently read George Michelsen Foy's 2016 book Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human. It deals with physical navigation and how our approach to navigation has changed over time. On a deeper level, it's a meditation on how we humans find our way in life and how…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure Many of us played with building blocks, or similar toys, as children. Lego bricks, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets were common during my childhood, and they're all still available to kids today. I never had Lego sets, but I did have Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set. (The…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Currently I'm reading The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by scholar and classicist Mary Beard. Pompeii is briefly referenced in my current writing-project-in-progress, so I'm reading about the city primarily for research. Fundamentally, however, I'm reading a well-researched book by a respected historian about life in…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I recently self-published a novella that I started writing in 2017. It was inspired by the life (and death, in early 2017) of a dog that I adopted from a shelter in 2002. It's called Buddy and Thomas, and it's about a stubborn dog that disrupts the life…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. As a lifelong insomniac, I looked forward to reading Benjamin Reiss' 2017 book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. I wasn't disappointed. Wild Nights is not a book about how to get a better night's sleep. Instead, it's a cultural study of the history of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Talk about creativity. Lately there seems to be a tidal wave of people changing their minds. Some of the same people who compared President Barack Obama to Hitler by way of opposition are now of the opinion that maybe Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, after all. People…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. In a previous post I mentioned the book Conversations with Charlie Haden, a series of interviews with the great musician conducted by Josef Woodard. Haden had a long working relationship with another legendary musician, Pat Metheny, and Metheny participates in one of the interviews in the book. In…
The Creative Life Adventure 