Curious Lists

I love lists. I've written about this before, both how lists can help you understand yourself and figure things out and how lists can function in other ways, including as stories.

Lists can also help spark runs of creativity and break blocks. I'm having a great time playing with Curious Lists: A Creative Journal for List-Lovers and I bet you would too. It includes all kinds of prompts for lists, many of which you can interpret as either quite mundane or as permission for flights of fancy. It's broken into general topics and then specific lists.

Topics include:

• Lists for Tuesdays
• Lists for Bedtime
• Lists for Friends to Help With

and specifics within topics include:

• Gourds better for carving
• Elaborate schemes for avoiding a call
• Walkable cities
• Rattling objects

See what I mean? You can be pretty straightforward or go way out on a limb with these. I'm finding it quite inspirational and an awful lot of fun, so from time-to-time I'll post one of my lists here. I'd love to see your additions to my lists.


Nomadic Cultures (c) Curious Lists
An anthropological whimsy, by Miss Laura S. Packer, observed in her travels and over many pancake breakfasts.

The wandering shoes

• Usually bi-color
• Rarely in pairs, tribes of lefts or rights
• Found under beds, gone the next morning
• Coming of age rituals involve hunting dustbunnies

The lost hipster tribes

• Known for their cool silence and occasional witty sayings
• Artifacts include coffee cup sleeves, shed technological items, beard trimmings
• Sightings said to presage the opening of another Starbucks

Landbound fisherfolk

• Travel in landcruisers
• Native costume includes slightly too tight t-shirts from obscure tourist resorts
• Extensive mythology around lost objects nearly found
• Mating rituals include fire dances
• Mythology passed on around firepits, during ritual sacrifice of mallows found only in marshes

Hordes of traveling salesmen

• A questing horde, driven by religious fervor for “Deal”
• Wander from sales meeting to sales meeting
• Regarded w/ great fear by hospitality industry
• Known to be reckless and destructive in search of the elusive “Deal”
• Should one of the tribe rise above the rest in their quest they are sacrificed to “mammon-ment”

(c)2010 Laura S. Packer