Upon first reading the thread title, I thought of the pasta art we made in kindergarten. I noodled a few masterpieces in my day. Now I just cook & eat that stuff. So in terms of cuisine, when I improvise a new pasta recipe, I’m noodling sure enough.
In writing, I do the equivalent by “writing about writing” if that makes any sense. Like, I can’t quite get a scene or paragraph to play out right, so I’ll start writing something about how I want the scene to go. After enough time spent doing this, I almost always wind up with something that I can cut/paste/edit/rewrite into the final draft.
Oh yeah - I thrive on that half-brain engagement while watching TV. I do best with sports - you can let a baseball game unfold and engage for the action while noodling away…
As a very, very amateur photographer who has never met an editing software she didn’t like, I call it fiddling with my pictures. Long before I get to a finished state, I play and play and play with them some more. So there’s various, crops, focuses, filters, whatever attempts going on. Sometimes running them through multiple, different platforms before I’m finally satisfied.
I fart around with calligraphy - it’s far closer “crap” than “craft” - and I’ll do random letterforms just for the pleasure of ink on pen and paper.
I carve and stamp all the small leather offcuts that can’t really be used for anything else. Try different backgrounds or stamp combinations.
On the third floor of our house is a sizable space that is the designated band room for the fellows that make up our band. There are a few amps, my drum kit, mixing board, and other musical items and we gather here to practice/jam.
Prominently displayed but routinely ignored is a “No Noodling” sign.:mad:
I haven’t done this much lately (but I’ll have to take it up again, because NaPoWriMo starts tomorrow!), but I used to think of difficult (not impossible) to rhyme words and noodle around with finding a good rhyme.
Or a friend of mine and I used to come up with wacky poem titles then write something to fit. My two personal favorites were: “How Leonard Nimoy translated Freud for the platypoda” and “On opening a door while it snows like a motherfucker.”
With fiber arts I dig out boxes of cloth or bags of yarn and spread it around the rug and put pieces that ‘go together’ beside each other in fans and circles. I stack inspiring sets of cloth/yarn together in groups. I call it ‘wallowing’.
With programming design I stare into space or pace around while structures fiddle round in my head until they connect up nicely. Then I scribble very short cryptic notes as to how they all fit. Then I write a sort of ‘outline’ program with ‘the blahblah section goes here’ all through the code, just to see if it still looks feasible when (sort of) coded.
I’m a jazz singer, and my noodling takes the form of singing random bits of tunes while putzing around the house. I play with improvising, and sometimes singing through a melody a capella tells me how well I actually know it (or don’t). Every now and then the noodling will lead to actual work – sitting at the piano, breaking out iReal Pro to figure out a key, repeating a tricky interval over and over until I get the pitches right, etc. – but mostly it’s just various bits of singing.
Fanfiction vignettes. Hey, man, it works for me.