Nurturing Creativity

Before I was fifteen I had written several short stories and poetry, started two fake companies, designed and implemented a computer game, written roughly a dozen different larger computer applications and had friends join me in writing a film script, creating a board game, a gossip paper, several huts and an artificial language.

Between my fifteenth and my twentieth I tinkered with electronics and different kinds of software. I built a one-way radio and various bits of computer equipment. I co-authored and edited a book on software.

And in the seven years since? I totally immersed myself in what I had been doing earlier, numbing myself to any other creative impulses. I wrote software, the same software. Working on free software for a living was all I ever wanted to do since I discovered it in my early teens. But I’m now ready to move on, or at least ready to broaden my horizons once more.

I’d like to do more writing again. As an exercise I’m going to mimic my friend M.’s approach and write something at least every week. But, unlike him, I’m not going to pick a random word starting with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. As you might have noticed, most of the post titles on this blog are song titles that are vaguely related to the posts. In line with that I’m going to pick a random song from my music collection each week, and use its title as the subject for my writing.