Arbitrary Productivity

Drop it in a checklist

Here’s Your Creative Burst for Today: Make a Random Checklist

This takes 5 minutes.

1. Copy a short excerpt of text. This could be from a classic poem, an essay, or the first piece that catches your eye in a magazine online.

2. Drop it into a checklist.

For my first try, I used a poem I read this spring by Alice Walker. I love how the first lines feel like immediate action items for resisting in a world that is not made for you. Be an outcast. Check. But later in the list, some of the lines start to feel both absurd and more serious. To madness. Check. (Uncool). Check.

Next, I took a passage from an article that I’d saved from Scientific American on the mutation behind the color of orange cats. I used Google Keep for this one, cutting words and lines as I arranged the text into the checklist. Is it very good? No. But, I do like the title and the last line. And, I enjoyed the process. I hope you will, too.

Closing Cat with Thoughts

Here is a photo of our orange cat, Otis. If this isn’t your first time reading Creative Bursts, you may have picked up by now that in a creative practice, I love lists, I love working with materials that already exist, and I think it’s helpful, at least for a little while, to let go of making sense.

Thanks for following along with me. Let me know if you give a checklist a try!

Liz

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