Fuel Friday for Your Creative Soul:
Friday is here and it’s time to fuel our creative souls for the weekend. Get out your keyboards. We’re going to do an exercise together to stretch the tentacles of your gray matter. Let them relax and sigh.
This is to help you visualize your story in more detail. Give your tentacles something to cling onto.
Think about your novel. You know the one, that never seems to get finished. I know you have some hiding in your file drawers or being used as a door stop. Get out the piles of paper and set it front of you.
- What is the first image you picture when you read the first two sentences or outline of your novel? Close your eyes. What do you hear?
My answer: I picture small town with one main street surrounded by forests of bright green trees with fluttering leaves, clean, fresh air, and sunlight. Main street is lined with tourists who have large SUVs and trucks. Orange kayaks, tents, fishing poles and silver canoes are bungeed to the tops. Cargo shorts, jeans, and hiking gear walk past me and the main purchases being carried down the street are 12 packs, water bottles, and coolers of fishing bait. One lone tourist strolls past, clicking with each step as their walking sticks hit the concrete. A howl of a wolf suddenly echoes from behind the buildings as one alpha calls out to the pack at the Wolf Center.
- What colors do you see when you put yourself in the settings of your story? How and why do they change?
My answer: I see bright and dark greens. Golden sunlight. Sounds of water from the large lakes. Loud motors from the few cars that disappears you turn the corner. Silver and orange canoes and kayaks. I also see neutral colors mixed in with jeans. You can’t be in Minnesota without red and black flannel.
- What do you smell?
My answer: Musty earth, moldy grass on trees, fresh cut lawns, wild flowers, fishy tackle boxes, some bog water on boats and fishing poles, motor oil, wood, pine, sweat from the humid summer, fried food as you walk down the streets.
- What mood are you trying to set?
My answer: Small town, quiet, with bursts of tourist activity, traffic flowing in and out of main street, quiet back roads with roads too narrow for 2 cars, rustic, outdoor, rural, and wild outside of the small area of town. This town still holds onto some of it innocence, especially when the tourists leave for the winter.
- What music would you play in the background?
My answer: This town is all about country music or Four Seasons for those with classical taste. Allen Ginsberg might be pacing back and forth and reciting “Howl” after leaving the city and reaching this town.
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