Getting creative this fall is easier than ever
When it comes to choosing a favorite season, fall wins hands downs for me. It’s sweatshirt weather and hot chocolate drinking time.
Yet, the biggest and best part of fall is the fun creative outlets that come in the form of Inktober and NaNoWriMo. Both Inktober and NaNoWriMo provide creative people white a fun challenge to create either drawings or to write.
And they both indirectly provide a way to help relieve some stress.
Inktober
During the month of October, people who enjoy drawing or sketching have the opportunity to participate in Inktober. Inktober focuses on providing a prompt each day for inspiration.
As a studio art major, the appeal of participating in Inktober is a way to continue building my experience as an artist. Especially since it’s hard sometimes to keep on coming up with new inspiration for pieces.
The other benefit is drawing, or doing anything creative can help to reduce stress.
A column on Very Well Mind, states creating art for even 20 minutes can help to reduce stress. Elizabeth Scott, the author of the column, wrote about how this was discovered by conducting research in which the participants were divided into a group that would create artwork or a group that would stack art prints for 20 minutes.
Inktober provides a way fun break from the assignments that I and other students have to do for classes.
NaNoWriMo
The other fun challenge is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) during the month of November.
How NaNoWriMo works is anyone that wishes to participate signs up, announces what their novel is about and then spends the month of November writing their novel.
How NaNoWriMo defines a novel is 50,000 words. Despite coming up with a 50,000 body of work in just 30 days seems intimidating, the actual goal of NaNoWriMo is a simple one: to get writers writing.
Participating in a creative writing challenge like NaNoWriMo can just be as healthy as drawing during Inktober.
According to an article on the American Psychological Association‘s website, creative writing can have benefits for anyone including people with terminal diseases.
The article talks about a study done with 107 patients who wrote for 20 minutes a day three times a week. After four months, 70 of these patients saw improvement with their stress levels.
As college students, we may not necessarily have terminal diseases, yet stress does impact us. According to Foster EDU, students who have reported being stressed have also reported having lower grades.
With midterms upon us, and the remainder of a busy semester, it’s the perfect time to find a creative outlet.
Inktober and NaNoWriMo can possibly provide just one outlet for us as students to enjoy to relieve some of our stress.
Even if you don’t participate in either month-long activity, grab a piece of paper, a writing utensil and allow yourself to do something creative with it for a study break.
