Creating Daily Creates

Creating Daily Creates

The open online digital storytelling course DS106 has a component known as the Daily Create. This article unpacks the behind the scenes work that goes into a daily prompt to encourage people to stop and take time to create each day.

We have now reached 1047 days where we have posted a different prompt each day. We both think that is pretty amazing.

As we talked about the process of finding ideas for the daily creates it occurred to us that there is a creative process at play in getting the prompt just so. The DS106 open online community can and does submit ideas which the editors then shape for the prompt.

The ‘job’ is so much more than editing prompts though.

We think of it as Chance the Gardener did about his garden in ‘Being There’.

Creating a daily create involves many activities:

Search and use the network: “This is just like television, only you can see much further.”

Experience the prompt yourself: “I’m a very good gardener.”

Cycling ideas: “Yes. In a garden, growth has its season. First comes spring and summer but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.”

Experiment and give things time: “Yes. There will be growth in the spring.”

There is a time to move on from the editor’s job: “The garden that I left was such a place. I don’t have that anymore. All I have left is the room upstairs.”

A passion for tinkering just for the sake of learning and watching others learn: “I like to watch the young plants grow. Young plants do much better if a person helps them.”

It is okay to fail: “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.”

[This is an unfinished story I found in my drafts written 7 years ago! The Daily create is still going ( at over 3,700 prompts now) and it is again being edited by my co-author here Alan Levine. I have contributed a couple lately, but my attention is more on my Daily Stillness site, which does the same thing but offers daily practices to find still moments in a busy day. I have published over 2,500 of those. Also amazing. I have left this article unfinished rather than try to get back to a moment in time where a favourite film and a favourite creative activities collided in a zoom call. Thanks Alan for all you do to keep dailies going.]