if you're ever in the mood for some Malay

This is something a little bit more left-field than the usual left-field stuff I usually do.

It's a website called SudahlaBro.com (SLB for short), a Malay language site that MAM Media hopes to build into a lifestyle, current affairs portal with really good content. Like Playboy, but without the girls.

It's early days yet, and so far we've only come up with a column called 'Suara Bro' (I know), in which I write about things, life, stuff in general.

Suara Bro, along with everything else on SLB is published every Friday morning, so keep an eye out folks.

You can read the previous ones here.

‘Young literary men in KL’

They might be writing somewhere in a dark room. The keys on their laptops only half-lit from the glow of the monitors.  

They might be writing. They should be writing.

“Who is going to listen to all these words in my head?”

Ideas, ideas, what do you do with all these ideas?

“You analyse too much”

Do they have a life inside of my head, does that make them real? 

“What is wrong with you?”

shut up

There wasn’t any space left for them to speak, so they left the hall. They didn’t write to rule, they thought originality was worth a shot, but they were wrong. Why don’t they just follow? 

“Can you write it so that it says something like this:....”

Literary young men is a concept, a fine shorthand, for the idealised male that no one really wants. As pc as diversity and multiculturalism. 

Do you get what it really means? 

It’s chaos and disruption and doubt and fickleness and weight.

Give it up, give it up

writers who are dramatic and censor themselves endlessly

"there wasn’t enough in the story to warrant a flipbook let alone a short story."

Does that sound familiar?

Crippling self-doubt and hate kill a story more often than censors do. 

Don't blame the censoring folks, they get a bad rap anyway. It's just their job, protecting innocent minds. 

People who make those stuff up but too lazy of finding ways to put it in a way that the C-folks don’t see it as objectionable material should learn how to.

That is, if they ever get to learning how to write subtle subversion, since they’re too busy editing themselves. In their heads. 

another place I'll be writing at

check out my intern blog over at http://www.nativedigital.com.au/interns/

for articles, videos, and early career tips.

and I promise no emo. I keep all that for this address

Frustration does not refresh stale routines

If you wake up everyday and find your mind traversing the same paths repeatedly, and you play the same chords on the piano repeatedly, and you write the same scenes repeatedly, you probably should stop.

It's time to break that routine.

This link gives some good suggestion for steps you can take to start anew. Among them:

- Journaling: you need to record ideas and get them out of your head – make room for new ideas
- Puzzles: problem solving, you can train yourself to be better
- Creativity Exercises: you need a purpose to be creative
- Purposeful Exploration: find creative inspiration in traditional media – take a purposeful look at these things – pay attention while watching tv, reading newspaper and find ways that others have expressed their creativity. Often we use these mediums to escape but we should look at them in a different way.
- Human Interaction: we are communal creatures – creativity is born from experience including other peoples. All people solve problems – surround yourself with people different from you. We need new perspectives.

Of all the suggestions listed, it's the last one I find most interesting.

Thanks to the RMIT library, I've had a lot of fun reading books that detail experiments on human interactions. These experiments attempt to figure out what brings individuals to react in certain ways through a variety of means: variation of stimuli, subconcious suggestions, and sometime just plain exposure. They try to be as rigorous as conditions allow them to be, after which the data is collected and analysed to come up with explanations for behaviours and actions.

If you're not already alarmed by the thought of manipulation, let me just say these findings trickle down to the world of advertising, management, and marketing. It is in these fields, that these theories gain their practical forms.

Of course, we've veered off-topic slightly there, but there are thoughts there useful for breaking routines.


Change one thing, unleash a new wave of creativity

In trying to understand human behaviour, the researchers changed every possible variable to see how their subjects responded.

In trying to break away from a routine, we could do the same to see what unlocks the door to a new way of thinking. Start with the small things, it's always the details that matter. Have tea instead of coffee. Black instead of with sugar. Sleep on your back instead of on your side.
Work your way up if it doesn't work: take a different route to work, try a new way of talking to people, pick up a new sport.

Something must eventually work. It might already be working, only that you don't realise it. Not all change drops on you like a ton of bricks. Some simmer from the sides, gradually changing the nature of your thoughts.

Through patience, old routines are broken.