photo from christine mason miller.
this week's tip comes from twyla tharp's book, the creative habit. an excerpt from the book:
george harrison once decided, as a game, to write a song based on the first book he saw at his mother's house. picking one up at random, he opened it and saw the phrase 'gently weeps', whereupon he promptly wrote his first great song, while my guitar gently weeps.
this is a great challenge and one i practice often in my own work and i also do an exercise like this in my markmaking workshops. you don't necessarily have to go to your mother's house to choose a book, but do a modified version of this exercise by going through a dictionary or thesaurus and make a piece based on one randomly chosen word, a group of randomly chosen words or a randomly chosen phrase out of a randomly chosen book--you get the idea...but you MUST use first words that you see, don't be choosy...have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment