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The World As Inspiration

February 26th, 2008

View from the Kitchen Window I am not much of a morning person. It takes me a while to get going, to motivate myself to get out of bed. It’s worse when it’s winter because we keep the temperature at 65 during the day (reducing it to 57, I think, at night), and the upstairs bedrooms don’t have air vents to any heat up there is from convection or space heaters.

Anyway, I drag myself out of bed this morning. I knew we were getting snow. We’d gotten about half an inch before we went to bed last night, and there was a snow advisory. Half asleep, I walk past the kitchen window and glance outside and see the snow on the tree branches. (The picture to the left is the view out of that window.)

The sight serves to remind me how beautiful nature can be - and how much I dislike winter. Don’t get me wrong. I’m Canadian, so I’ve seen my share of snow. I like hockey (though I prefer baseball). I loved making snowmen and snow forts and having snowball fights when I was a kid. Problem is winter is cold, and cold makes my hands hurt.

Winter’s also a great time for writing. When that blanket of white covers the ground, it’s a blank slate for inspiration. A path left by someone trudging through the fresh fallen snow. Where are they going? Where did they come from? What are they thinking? The wind blows the snow into a huge drift that partially covers a car. What if it wasn’t snow, but sand?

Some of great ideas can be found in the world around us. The March 2008 issue of the Smithsonian magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It has an article about cheetahs. From a quick scan of the article, I saw that cheetahs are considered to be easily “tamed”. What kind of stories spring to mind from that tidbit of information (regardless of whether or not I remembered that info correctly)? If you were going to anthropomorphize a cheetah, or create a shapeshifter or race based on the cheetah, how might that define their personalities?

It’s this kind of thing that I think encourages a writer to become more aware of the world around them, and what’s in it. More than just people watching, they should nature watch. Writers should read, but not just fiction. Nonfiction not only helps a writer making her world more “real”, making sure she gets her facts right, but is a source for all kinds of different ideas.