Living a creative life
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I’m a fan of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and recently enjoyed his latest work, The Dead Don’t Die. It’s the only zombie film I’ve seen in its entirety, so while I appreciated some of the genre references (such as allusions to George Romero’s work), I was more interested in…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. This year I'm doing something I wish I had done last year: a list of my ten favorite books of 2019. Most of these books were published before 2019, but this is the year I read them. Several of these books have been referenced in previous Creative Life…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. The title of this post doesn't refer to the 1979 horror film When A Stranger Calls. Instead I'm talking about, from time to time, scheduling a change of scenery. Long periods of deep focus are common with creative work. This is necessary and if you're struggling to stay…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. There is a romanticized image of the lonely artist, the tortured soul who courageously clings to a solitary vision while remaining misunderstood by the ignorant masses. Ayn (“Ayn the Pain”) Rand created an entire long-winded novel, The Fountainhead, around this image. The lonely artist is often portrayed in…
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've come across two works recently that got me thinking about the importance of analysis in creativity. The first was a passage from Steven Hyden's 2018 book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock. The book explores, among other things, cultural aspects of…
