Language Is A Virus

If you enjoy playing with words or are attracted to writing as a process, I think you’ll enjoy Language Is A Virus, a site full of fun tools and tricks as well as a bunch of interesting old articles from some notoriously wild Beat and Dada writers.

If you like stuff like my post on writer’s block, you’ll love the “Writing Techniques” section of the home page, with tricks and ciphers that inspired the greats, like Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, Allen Ginsberg’s Mind Writing Slogans, and Salvador Dali’s Paranoiac-Critical Method.

And, if you’ve ever played games like Exquisite Corpse, you’ll also dig the many little tools for slice-and-dice word play, including Cut-Up Machine, Madlib Poem, Title-o-Matic.

Very fun site and a neat way to loosen yourself up creatively (as well as kill most of your morning). (N.B., Safari users: I got no love on the tool pages; try Firefox instead)

If you find this stuff really turns your crank, grab a copy of A Book of Surrealist Games, some very funny and silly exercises “[I]nvented and played by such artists as André Breton, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst, these gems still produce results ranging from the hilarious to the mysterious and profound.” (book site). Got this as a gift a few years back and it’s fun to pull out when you need a creative jolt or a quick lesson in taking “your craft” less deadly seriously.

Technorati Tags: creativity, surrealism, tools, writing