Ok, that headline is a sleepy joke but kennings can be fun creativity tools to help reconnect you with your creative brain.
I wrote about them in another post dispelling the myth that only certain people are creative. Spoiler: you are creative. but I wanted to pull out the writing prompt and drop it here for easy access.
What’s a kenning?
A kenning is a unique way to describe something, usually by linking a couple of words together to make you think of something else.
My mattress is now the tired-Mom catcher.
The phone could become they eyeball magnet.
Then you can take those concepts and drop them into stories or poems or texts and see if it gives you a little fresh insight into what you’re describing.
Impressive Research with Kennings in Job Titles
If you have a few minutes to check out this article in the Harvard Business Review, it shows some surprising results from retitling their roles to get to the heart of their personal identity and mission.
“An infectious disease specialist became a ‘germ slayer,’ a nurse who gave lots of immunizations became a ‘quick shot,’ an X-ray technician became a ‘bone seeker.'”
They were found, several weeks later, to have less emotional exhaustion and they felt better recognized for their work expressing greater sense of psychological safety, which could improve communication, the article explained.
Now you try!
Pick an object or a job title or an aspect of your daily life that doesn’t have an official name but totally should. Write it down and give yourself 10 minutes (or 7 or 5 or 2) and see if you can write a kenning of your own, something to make you smile, something to send to a friend to brighten their day, something to offer yourself grace.
Fiction writers, you could also play with kennings to see if you could get at interesting descriptions of characters or places in your works-in-progress.
