Please forgive the filler words and mouth noises. My audio editing skills are atrocious – I need to find a Mac app instead. It will be better to edit on a bigger screen I feel.
Sam
I rearranged some of the posters on my wall. I need Hello Kitty posters. I am also looking for those 70s posters of black women with their massive fros. Angela Davis is on my wall but I feel I want a Huey P. Newton and a Malcolm X.
Thursday evening I was learning about the principles of different thinking styles and the science of creativity, which included a number of brainstorming techniques, SCAMPER and morphological analysis, among other tools. The best part of this new knowledge is something called a morphological chart.
I spend too much time reading, analyzing and gathering info.
Jayne Fro (lol)
But I don’t like to rush and it’s all good cause I’ve never missed a deadline.
I sometimes wonder if all the gathering and analyzing is a form of procrastination.
IDK
Morphological charts are useful for generating ideas you might not come to on your own when problem-solving because of your thinking style. For example, you start the process by filling out the chart with generic solutions to a problem by breaking down each function into its subparts and the means by which those sub-parts can be fulfilled.
Let’s take my book fridge; all refrigerators need a way to remove heat and put cold in the right place via a compression/expansion cycle. This gives you four basic must-have parts to a fridge and these four subsystems (compressor, condenser, expansion device and evaporator) have different functions and possibly different designs. You also need to decide what your refrigerant is going to be, what kind of shelves system you’ll have and that’s before we get to the aesthetics of the fridge. Cool right!
After you understand your sub-components and the means by which everything can function – you plop all of that into your chart – you pick your different means and you try to come up with a first design of what your fridge would look like. Maybe if you want to use water as your refrigerant then you can only use certain types of compressors (I just made that up – I have no idea).
All of that leads me to what I really want to tell you – a morphological analysis can be applied to creating fictional stories. A guy named Vladimir Propp wrote Morphology of the Tale, which outlines various parts of a story (theme, form, setting, period, etc.) Someone plot these in a chart and created The Morphological Chart for Fictional Narratives. Thank you, Someone! That chart, along with my understanding of the five personality traits to help with character creation, I feel ready – now I just gotta write. None of that matters if I don’t write! ugh.
I normally share this with you after I return but the last time I forgot to tell you about my out-of-office notification and by the way, I’m going away next week. I won’t tell you where yet. Message to co-workers:
I got that idea because the last time I was at the playground this woman was acting like I’m gonna run away with her child. Every time her daughter came near me and we played peek-a-boo, she’d call her away. I scream, “I’m not into girls bitch!” Now, I gotta find a new ground to play at.
Maybe I’ll tell you about SCAMPER another time. Or not – you can look it up for yourself. Writing two starts this Sunday – I’m very excited! BTW – I am almost certain I’ve finally found my favourite artists:
Terada Katsuya – I love the detail in his work; there’s so much to take in and how he combines organic/inorganic (human, animal, machine) it feels very sci-fi.
Rick Barton – Again, I love the details and some of his works look like they were made from one continuous line.
And I recently discovered Elizabeth Catlett – She’s also a sculptor but I love her prints, not sure why yet, likely more for the subject matter. Some of her pieces remind me of Picasso.
And that is that! I hope you have a wonderful weekend
Fri Jul 7, 2023
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