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When Emily Daggett Weiss boarded the Twentieth Century Limited in the spring of 1913, bound for a brief sojourn in the West, one or two old biddies gave her the hairy eye. Woman traveling alone. No better than she should be, as her mother used to say about young women of low moral standards. Worse than the biddies, a traveling salesman winked at her. -Irene Fleming, The Brink of Fame
Fiction Writing Prompt: Use the first line of the week as the starting point or inspiration for a scene, story, poem, or haiku.
Journaling Prompt: Imagine traveling a century back in time. What would be the most difficult thing for you to get used to?
Art Prompt: 1913
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Write about how women’s place in society has changed in the last century.
Photo Credit: phlubdr on Flickr
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Resistance increases the more people sense that they cannot influence what is happening to them. -Ken Blanchard, Leading at a Higher Level
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write about a resistance movement fighting against a conspiracy.
Journaling Prompt: Write about how you respond to change. Does your level of resistance change if you have some control in the process?
Art Prompt: Resistance
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Write an article informing your audience about ways that they can decrease resistance to change.
Photo Credit: zoonabar on Flickr
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“I am not as I once was.” — N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene or poem starting with the first line of the week.
Journaling Prompt: Write about how you have changed in the last year.
Art Prompt: Create art inspired by the first line of the week.
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Write about your system for creating change in your life.
Photo Credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D. – Global Photo Archive on Flickr
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“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”
Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. “Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says…
“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,” Berns says…
Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene, or poem based on a cultural shift that challenges people’s sacred values.
Journaling Prompt: Write about your personal values and how you feel if they are challenged.
Art Prompt: Brain and Societal Change
Photo Credit: mariopiperni on Flickr
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“We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit–” Rasali said, as if starting a sentence, and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as if she were speaking to herself. “The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort: tonight, do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things, right? A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer, because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”
“You can never know how things will change you,” Kit said.
“If you don’t, you have not waited to find out.” -Kij Johnson, The Man Who Bridged the Mist in Asimov’s Science Fiction
Writing Prompt: Write a scene or story about someone who is waiting to see how things will change him or her.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a time when you waited to see how something would change you before you committed. Afterwards, were you right about how you changed or not?
Art Prompt: Waiting for Change
Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr
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Whenever Hwang goes to sleep, he jumps forward in time. This is a problem. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself. Sometimes Hwang wakes to find that he’s only jumped forward a few days. The most Hwang has ever jumped is one hundred seventy years. -Alice Sola Kim, Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters (free to read at Lightspeed Magazine online)
Writing Prompt: Write a scene where one of your characters wakes up in the morning 100 years in the future.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a time when you felt like everything you knew was suddenly changed. How did you deal with it?
Art Prompt: Time Travel
Photo Credit: lissalou66 on Flickr
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Life may indeed be very fairly divided into the seasons of HOPE and FEAR. In YOUTH, we hope every thing may be right: in AGE, we fear every thing will be wrong. -William Kitchiner, The Cook’s Oracle; and Housekeeper’s Manual
Writing Prompt: Write a character sketch for someone who is old, addressing regrets and loss.
Journaling Prompt: How would you describe the season of life you are in right now?
Art Prompt: Seasons of Life
Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr
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The day I get the call that changes my life is a Thursday. -Helen Smith, Alison Wonderland
Writing Prompt: Create a scene or poem using the line above as an inspiration.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a phone call that changed your life.
Art Prompt: Phone Call
Photo Credit: eelke dekker on Flickr
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If you are coming to this web site, I assume you are a fan of creativity. You cultivate it, share it, and are proud of it. Not everyone is a fan, however.
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.”How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science…
Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but “uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most,” the researchers wrote. “Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. …
The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene with a creative character surrounded by people who are invested in the status quo.
Journaling Prompt: When have your creative ideas been shot down by people who are threatened by it? Have you ever stifled your own creativity because of your inner editor?
Art Prompt: Creativity
Photo Credit: country_boy_shane on Flickr
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What would happen if something rare, and therefore valuable, all of the sudden became common?
A lovely world indeed is Galgala the golden, where myriads of auriferous microorganisms excrete atoms of gold as metabolic waste. It is everywhere on this planet, the lustrous pretty metal. It turns the rivers and streams to streaks of yellow flame and the seas to shimmering golden mirrors. Huge filters are deployed at the intake valve of Galgala’s reservoirs to strain the silt of dissolved gold from the water supply. The plants of Galgala are turgid in every tissue, leaf and stem and root, with aureous particles. Gold dust, held in suspension in the air, transforms the clouds to golden fleece.
Therefore the once-precious stuff has grievously lost value throughout the galaxy since Galgala was discovered, and on Galgala itself a pound of gold is worth less than a pound of soap. But I understand very little about these economic matters and care even less. Only a miser could fail to rejoice in Galgala’s luminous beauty. We have been here six weeks; we have awakened each morning to the tinkle of golden chimes, we have bathed in the golden rivers and come forth shining, we have wrapped our bodies round with delicate golden chains. -Robert Silverberg, The Travelers
Writing Prompt: Create a story about a valuable commodity that suddenly becomes common. What happens to your world?
Journaling Prompt: What beautiful and/or rare item do you wish were common and why?
Art Prompt: Gold
Photo Credit: miong on Flickr
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