Lesson #5: Create

Note: If you want to read all the lessons, click on the category: Making Big Things Happen

This is the both the easiest and the hardest part.  Make stuff.  Create.  If you’ve followed your curiosity, looked into a few things and begun to imagine, you are ready to make something.

You may still be lost.  You may still be shrugging your shoulders.  Well, for the first group of people, dive in.  Make that cake shaped like a rocket ship.  You’ve been thinking about it and you’re ready to do it.  Or unveil your new signature move at the basketball game.

The funny thing about creating is that, when all the conditions are right, it rolls right out of you.  That’s the way it was with my book, Donuthead. I didn’t even know I was ready to write it, but writing it was the easiest thing in the world.  The first time.  I wrote it more than once.  I wrote it…well, more than twenty times.  And it changed a lot.



Donuthead...so easy to write...the first time

So the point here is, if you’re ready, dive in.  If you’re not ready.  If you’re sitting around batting your eyelashes and shrugging your shoulders, then just create something.  Get out the old legos and build a castle.  Make a new dinosaur out of sidewalk chalk.  You know the old saying, “Any creating helps all creating?”  Of course, you don’t know it. I  just made it up.  I created it!  But it’s true.  We will come back to lesson #5 again and again.  But there’s a funny thing about creating.  There’s not much to say about it.  You’re either ready or you aren’t.  And when you are—it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Lesson #4: Imagine

Note: To see all the lessons, click on the category: Making Big Things Happen

Okay, now you believe something amazing can happen and YOU can be the one to make it happen.  And you’ve identified something that you are really curious about and you’ve started looking into it.  Here’s a very fun step.  Take all that you have learned and apply your imagination to it.  Imagination is the bridge between what we know and we have yet to discover or create.  Tillie, for example, had to really put her ‘imaginator’ to work to see herself on a bicycle.  First of all, girls weren’t supposed to ride bicycles.  And second of all, to really ride bicycles, she couldn’t wear the clothes that girls were supposed to wear.  Imagine if the only way you could be a really good basketball player was to play in your underwear.  Imagine how exposed you’d feel on the court. That’s what Tillie had to imagine—and then she had to imagine how she could do it because she knew getting out of that big bulky dress was the only way to be a competitor.  Tillie had to imagine her uniform because such a piece of clothing didn’t exist.  But she had investigated what men wore and she knew how to sew.  This is how Tillie got to the races.  She didn’t want to attract attention if she didn’t have to….

But when she arrived, Voila!

So let’s get back to that cross dribble.  You’ve watched good players do it over and over again.  And they can confuse their opponents.  But imagine that you added a head fake or a lightning-fast behind-the-back dribble.  Would that be even more?  Even better? Or is there something simpler and more elegant?  Something that uses your strengths?

Everybody knows what chocolate cake is, but your brother doesn’t like cake as much as ice cream.  So, maybe for his birthday, you could pinch out the center of a cupcake and fill it with softened ice cream and then mound the ice cream up like frosting on the top.  It never hurts to be nice to your brother—imagine a really cool dessert for him!

As a writer of long stories, I have to imagine whole worlds—whole universes.  This is wonderful practice for all sorts of things—like coming up with the theme for the senior all night party or helping to advertise with a new-to-you prom dress sale.

What can you imagine that doesn’t exist?