This is the nineth in the series of prompts for creative projects that you might want to submit to the anthology of hope.

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Have you ever had a great idea that you are hopeful and excited about turning into a project? What happened next? If you are anything like me a voice in your head started pointing out all the ways it wouldn’t work. This inner critic voice seems to be part of being human and it is terrified of change. That’s it’s whole job is to try and stop us doing anything new in case we accidentally eat poison berries or fall out of a tree while we a hunting and gathering.

Our inner critic has access to all our creative skills and inner knowledge and it’s really good at making its fears seem like reality. For me the best response is usually to let it chatter away in the back seat while I focus on moving forward. However it can be fun to play around with challenging it.

One option might be to consider creating something and submitting it to the Anthology of Hope. What comes into your head? Note it down, the more reasons why you shouldn’t the better!

Now change pen or font and challenge each one the way you might if you were encouraging a friend to give something a try. Is what your critic suggests the only possible outcome? What do you hope might happen instead?

You can produce powerful things by keeping this dialogue serious or go down a more wacky road. So for instance you could respond to:

“No one will like what I produce, other people will do stuff that’s better…”

With

Everyone likes different things. Some people may not like what I contribute but for some people my way of describing things may be the one that suddenly makes sense and helps them have a personal breakthrough!

or

No maybe not I mean there could be some freak weather conditions that turn the sky purple with green lightening and make it rain frogs for the rest of the year and everyone will be too busy wading through frogspawn to want to look at what we made!

What would your two characters look like? Can you make an image of their debate if battle?

I’d love to feature what you create in the book. You can find the details on how to submit work to the anthology here.

This is the eighth in the series of prompts for creative projects that you might want to submit to the anthology of hope.

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