Mag­netic Fridge poetry! I love this stuff. It forces you to put together thoughts in unex­pected ways. It’s the con­straint on word choice that does it; you have to think of another way to say what you want given the avail­able vocab­u­lary. Arti­fi­cial lim­its are a great way to break writ­ers block or spark creativity.

Brian Eno made a set of cards he called Oblique Strate­gies that he would use for this pur­pose. Each card con­tained a direc­tive such as “Hon­our Your Error as a Hid­den Inten­tion” or “Make a blank valu­able by putting it in an exquis­ite frame”. Through hav­ing to carry out this direc­tive you take your­self in a direc­tion uncharted, or gain new per­spec­tive on a problem.

You can buy these cards on ebay, though the orig­i­nal sets can be pricey. They have since been put into many other forms like a pro­gram, placed on the web, and are even avail­able as a dash­board wid­get.

SongsToWearPantsTo is the brain­child of a very tal­ented musi­cian. This guy takes on the most arbi­trary and ludi­crous restraints that are sug­gested by the pub­lic and pulls them off with great flair and humour. Be sure to check out “A Rap Song in Which None of the Lyrics Con­tain the Let­ter E”

So remem­ber kids, next time you’re beat­ing your head against some­thing, put hand­cuffs on.

Tags: Creativity, Fun, Songwriting, Writer's Block

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 6:26 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.