Child’s play as creative process
James Navé and Allegra Huston use Imaginative Storm as an improv writing technique
TAKE AN IMAGE and contemplate it for 2 minutes: say, a photograph of some rusty plumbing. What are random words that pop in your mind as you ponder the image — “longing,” “intestines” and “furnace in Satan’s lair” are just a few of the quirky offerings by the participants of one Saturday morning’s Imaginative Storm Zoom writing group, hosted by coaches Allegra Huston and James Navé.
Or maybe watch a short video by the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, featuring eight grown adults jamming with carrots and leeks, or listen for several minutes to the crunchy groans of “singing ice” as another Saturday’s writing prompt. Write down the words that come to mind and share them: “birthing in the deep,” “railroad wind.” Then take 10 minutes to let your imaginative brain wag your rational brain in a writerly dance and see what happens — no stress, just surprises.
After many years collaborating as writers, editors and directors of creativity camps, Navé and Huston recognized a year ago that they were finally articulating an effective technique that Navé had been teaching for years to children. “Imaginative Storm worked because instead of defining this as a writing session,” he explains over a recent phone interview, “I turned it into play. Do you tell stories around the dinner table? Cruising with your friends
around town? Kids already love language, so using this technique works. I ask them to give a provocative image — a zebra, on a trapeze, eating a banana. Since the students were playing with their imaginative minds, they dropped their perfectionist guards and had fun.”
“For the first time we started thinking of writing as a training,” Huston jumps in enthusiastically, “like running a race or practicing for a concert. That noodling around enables you to write something fresh and surprising to yourself. When we do these prompts on Saturday morning, we offer an image or audio — see our YouTube videos of dancing egrets or ‘The Loch Ness Monster Song’ — we offer a sandbox, a play kit.”
Huston is the author of “Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found” and the novel “Say My Name,” as well as numerous screenplays. She has been a book editor and writing lecturer for many decades. Navé is a poet (“The Road,” “Looking at Light”), storyteller and teacher — he co-founded with Julia Cameron the Artist’s Way Creative Camp. Known for his virtuosic
memorization of poems, he quotes on the spot from his own upcoming work about the incremental process of healing from prostate cancer, “The 100 Days,” due out early next year from 3:A Taos Press.
Together the two writing mavens, who live near each other in Rio Hondo, have created Twice 5 Miles press, which publishes “the stuff nobody teaches you,” such as “How to Read for an Audience” (“a good reading is like pillow talk”) and “How to Edit and Be Edited” (“a good editor stays out of the writer’s way”). The next title is “How to Make a Speech” by Barrie Barton — due out in February.
“We are masters, experts, geniuses,” notes Huston, laughing, “then we get on these Saturday morning Zoom sessions and it has shaken my tree. I had no idea how powerful this process is!” After the prompt, the participants in the online Imaginative Storm sessions are then invited to read what they have written, and it is often hilarious. Says Navé, “When you think of this as play and not rejecting the rational mind — people stop thinking about wanting to be a writer, but just writing something that pleases them.”
“The trick is you’re not supposed to write well, just see what happens,” Huston is quick to add. “It’s not selfconscious and stilted. It comes out surprisingly fresh and original and intriguing — and you want to keep going.”
You can’t teach writing, these longtime motivational writing coaches admit. But what they can impart is an approach to stimulate the imagination. Explains Navé, “In the Imaginative Storm writing work, we encourage participants to stay in their rational minds and invite their stormy imaginative minds to lead the writing dance with their rational minds. It works every time.”
Check out their Saturday morning prompt sessions at 10 a.m. (MT) at the link at imaginativestorm.com. You can also find many of the prompts on YouTube videos. Huston and Navé plan to synthesize the technique into an upcoming book, as well. You can follow Navé’s regular Saturday podcast on KCEI, featuring all kinds of interviews with creative-thinking people, and find more information on both writers at allegrahuston.com and jamesnavé.com.