Guest Post Wed: Creativity Jumpstart: Projective Identification

It's said that a problem or premise can be viewed from two distinctive points of view -- the observer viewpoint and the merged viewpoint. Today's creativity method focuses on the second viewpoint.
The merged viewpoint occurs when you become the object of the observation. You become the subject of your observation, and you observe from the point of view of your subject. This is referred to as projective identification.

Projective identification can be purely fantasy:

What's it like to be a potato about to become French fries?
How does it feel like to be a gum stuck in a shoe?
Imagine what it's like to be an ink cartridge.

Or it can be empathetic:

Seeing the situation through a laborer's eyes
Getting inside the skin of an AIDS victim
Being in the shoes of a chronically depressed person

For your creative activity today, write 2 short texts (100-200 words) using projective identification for the following:
Fantasy: What's it like to be a picture frame?
Empathetic: Being in the shoes of a petty thief.

Here's a list to try this creative method on. Write in the voice or perspective of the following:

a banana about to go bad
a woman unable to conceive
a spare tire
a harassed telephone operator
a Band-Aid
an owner whose business is about to go bankrupt
a blank diskette
a guy about to break up with his girlfriend
a computer keyboard
a woman about to give an answer to a marriage proposal

Copyright © Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ

About Shery: Shery is the creator of WriteSparks!™- a software that generates over 10 *million* Story Sparkers for Writers. Download WriteSparks!™ Lite for free at http://writesparks.com

Comments

Interview Friday with Author Maggie Lyons

Maggie Lyons was born in Wales and brought up in England before gravitating west to Virginia’s coast. She zigzagged her way through a motley variety of careers from orchestral management to law-firm media relations to academic editing. Writing and editing nonfiction for adults brought plenty of satisfaction but nothing like the magic she discovered in writing fiction and nonfiction for children. Several of her articles, poetry, and a chapter book have been published in the children’s magazines Stories for Children Magazine and knowonder! VS: I want to thank you for being my guest here on The Writing Mama today, Maggie. To get things started can you share what you do to help balance your writing life with your family life? Maggie: Very fortunately for me, I’m retired and my son left the nest some time ago. That doesn’t mean I have no other commitments, of course. In fact, I’m very busy as a freelance editor, but I do have the privilege of being able to control m...

American Chronicle | Get to know Rodger Dodger Dog and His Author, Jan Britland

In 1986, Jan was driving her children in a new town to start school. On their way, they would pass a beagle type dog chained to a huge Magnolia tree. Some days they would see the chain hanging down from the tree. "I think we just assumed the dog was in the house until one day we realized he was up in the tree. From that day on, Rodger Dodger Dog as we called him became a favorite. It was a 45-minute drive, which can become boring so as we passed him, I would start telling a story about Rodger Dodger's adventures up the tree and beyond. Because I am so dyslexic, the stories had to rhyme so I could remember them from day to day. They also started the same to get me going," shared Britland. However, it wasn´t until 2008 when Britland received a phone call from her daughter Kelly, who had young children of her own that the Rodger Dodger Dog started to even think about becoming a children´s book or series for that matter. "My daughter was complaining her son ...

Interview Friday: Author Sands Hetherington

Sands Hetherington credits his son John for being his principal motivator. Sands raised his son as a single parent from the time John was six. He read to him every night during those formative years. He and young John developed the Crosley crocodile character in the series during months of bedtime story give-and-take. Sands majored in history at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and has an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in English from UNC-Greensboro. He lives in Greensboro. VS: I want to thank you for being my guest here on The Writing Mama today. To get things started, Sands, what do you do to help balance your writing life with your family life? Sands: Hi Mama and thanks for having me over. Actually, my family life was part of my writing life. I was a single (male) parent of a six-year-old son. We always did bedtime stories. One night John invented a red crocodile named Crosley for an after-lights-out companion. This evolved directly into...

VS Grenier ~ Award-Winning Author, Speaker & Podcaster

Search This Blog