​ The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools

Today is Just Because Day! Do something for no reason today. Wear mismatched socks. Have dessert before dinner. Take an unplanned drive.

Writers are terrible at spontaneity. We have trained ourselves to make everything count. The hour has to produce pages, the trip has to be research, the movie has to be studied. Even our rest gets justified. We call it filling the well, because we can't just watch a bad movie in the middle of the afternoon.

But creativity doesn't only come from effort. A lot of it comes from the two things effort tends to squeeze out: novelty and play.

Novelty gives you something to work with.

Your imagination doesn't invent out of nothing. It recombines. Everything you make is built out of things you've noticed, and the trouble with a settled life is that you stop noticing. Same route, same coffee shop, same corner of the internet. Put yourself somewhere unfamiliar and your brain starts noticing things, filing things away for your next story.

Play turns off our inner critic.

The other thing that happens when something is pointless is that it can't fail. There's no standard to fall short of, no one to disappoint, nothing riding on it. This is the magic of kids’ creation. They create without worry. Channel your inner eight year-old. Silliness isn't the opposite of serious work. It's the state serious work comes out of.

Be silly! Play! Goof off! Create!

Three Silly Things To Try to Reboot Your Creativity

1. Break one rule of your writing routine.

Change it for a week. Write longhand instead of on the computer. Take a walk and dictate a chapter. Write after dinner instead of in the morning. Write the last scene first. This is not a productivity hack. It’s a way to unlock your brain and boost your creativity.

2. Do something that you've never done because it doesn't interest you.

Buy a ticket to a sport you've never watched: minor league baseball, high school wrestling, a rodeo. Find the small, strange museum devoted to a subject you have zero interest in: barbed wire, telephones, mustard. The lack of interest is the point. You're not there to gather material. You're there to be an outsider, which forces you to look at everything, because you don't know yet what's worth looking at.

3. Try a genre you don’t like.

If there's a genre you always avoid, experience it. Watch a western, read a romance, go to the opera! What would your story be like if you changed genres? Is there something new you could incorporate in your work in progress?

Or just have the ice cream

If the week is already full, do the small version. Have ice cream for breakfast. Pay for a stranger’s coffee. Wear a hat. These take five minutes to remind you that not everything you do has to be productive to be worth doing. No reason required .

I'd love to hear about your adventures! Hit reply and tell me if your Just Because experiment sparked any new ideas.

Dive Deeper

​Improv for Writers: Ten Secrets to Help Novelists and Screenwriters Bypass Writer's Block and Generate Infinite Ideas by Jorjeana Marie

Interesting Inspiration

​Why You Can't Stop Buying Books You Don't Have Time to Read​

​How to Market a Book With Resilience ​

​Microdramas and Branded Storytelling​

Catch Up Corner

​Buddy Action vs. Bromance: What's the Difference? ​

​Old Friends vs. New Friends​

​How to Prompt AI for Developmental Edit​

Cheers,

Lindsey

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