Wreck This Journal: Innovation

I smile every time I work on my Wreck This Journal pages because they always put me in a situation where I never imagined myself.  Or have me doing something I never thought myself capable of completing.  For instance, who would have thought a book lover would fling a book across the room? When we challenge ourselves to do the unexpected, we open ourselves up to a world where anything is possible.  This is where innovation lives, just waiting for us to break free and find it.

This week’s page was a golden ticket to innovation in that it asked me to do something so ridiculous I was wondering if there was a punch line hiding on the next page.  I had to find a way to wear my journal! The most obvious idea was to wear it as a hat, but I can’t balance a book on my head to save my life. My pockets weren’t big enough to hold the journal and I didn’t have any yarn handy to tie it to my foot as a shoe.  There was only one option left:

    

My hoodie saves the day!

I should preface this by mentioning, I have a “thing” for hoodies.  My closet is full of them, in almost every color, weight, fit/cut, and fabric.  As far as I’m concerned there’s a hoodie for every occasion, so I usually wear them every day.  A fashionista I am not, but I am a sucker for comfort. As luck would have it, I was wearing a zip up hoodie that had some room where I could tuck my journal. One quick yank of the zipper pull and my journal was secure and visible as part of my outfit.  I wore it for a good hour while I memorialized my hoodie accessory with a drawing on my journal page.

This very simple exercise had me considering options that were really quite nonsensical, but the point is it got me thinking about those possibilities in the first place. The ability to break out of what’s considered normal or expected is what allows for creativity.  As a writer, this skill is critical if I want to write original stories.  I can’t be afraid to try something weird or consider an option that makes no sense.  Even if an idea doesn’t work,  I still consider it a stepping stone to one that will.

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c.b. 2012