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Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

Full Moon

January 6, 2007 – 8:04 pm

“In the absence of the sun, I’ll take a full moon.”

It’s funny how attuned a person can get to the cycles of the moon. I’d never really paid all that much attention to what phase the moon was in – I never had much cause to. It took buying land and actually moving our horses onto that property coupled with the short days of winter to change that. I miss those nights (or early mornings) where the moon hasn’t risen yet (or has just gone down) or where the moon is new, thus plunging the landscape into complete darkness. Those are the nights where I actually need the flashlight to see deliver the hay and grain out to the horses.

But when the moon is full, it’s almost as good as full sunlight. The human eye is able to make amazingly good use of exceedingly low light, and I love being able to walk around outside with just the moonlight to illuminate the way. There’s something about it that sparks the imagination. I can just see the plains of Middle Earth, men (and hobbits and dwarves and elves) traveling hard and fast to reach their destination before evil can catch them. I can see a special forces unit making a nighttime assault on a secret compound, their equipment amplifying the moonlight.

Of course, the moon hadn’t come up yet tonight when I went out to feed. Moonrise is still a little ways off, but at least it will be up for the morning feed. Things are always a little more spooky out there without the moonlight, especially when our local pack of coyotes is making a racket about a mile away. But it’s still a night for imagination, for creativity, and it’s always a lot of fun.

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Lightning

October 3, 2006 – 11:24 am

A thunderstorm rolled through our area in the early hours this morning, fortunately moving on quickly enough that I did not have to feed horses in the rain. It did not roll through so swiftly, though, that I was not able to see some of its beauty as it fled south. It was almost breath-taking to watch the cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning, particularly as it would follow a chain reaction from one end of the horizon to the other.

It’s those wee hours of the morning, before the sun comes up, that allows one’s mind to dwell on fantastic possibilities, and it was not hard to imagine that these electrical displays lighting up the dark sky were the product of some apocalyptic event or some extraterrestial invasion. It was enough to spur my writer’s mind into action, and I felt like a child again with endless possibilities before me.

I only wish I’d had the equipment to capture the storm on film.

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Closers

September 1, 2006 – 8:00 am

Diana Metz contemplates which is easier (or harder) to write – beginnings or endings. For me it’s almost always the ending. Most of the time when I sit down to write a story, I already know how it’s going to end. The beginning and middle are usually a little bit fuzzy, but that ending is the vivid picture in my mind and what drives me to completion. Less often, I will hear a line or two from the middle of the story, a snapshot from a scene without context. I know nothing of the characters wandering around in the scene, nothing about the world in which they live. I just see them doing things, saying things, and I know that there is a story there. Rare is the time when I have the beginning of the story in clear view, so that is almost always the hardest part for me.

In each of these cases, I usually have to let the idea sit and percolate for a while, let it simmer and stew in its own juices. I’m not sure what’s happening, let alone where it’s going, so until I do have some idea, it’s pointless to start writing. Often what happens is I come up with a separate story idea that eventually ties itself to this one. The two ideas, seemingly independent, become the formula for a new and different story, the setting for a universe I never imagined.

I have so many ideas now, though, that I suddenly have two universes beginning to form in my mind. One is a sci-fi setting; the other is a fantasy setting. I’m sure that if I give them long enough, both worlds will start to manifest themselves frequently in my writing. Frankly, I can’t wait.

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Bits of Burning Rock

August 1, 2006 – 10:47 am

I hadn’t realized until my wife and I moved back out to the country just how many shooting stars fall in a given night. Nearly every time I am outside, in the dark, to feed the horses, whether it be early morning or after sunset, I usually see at least one or two.¹ I don’t remember ever seeing so many as a kid, but then again I grew up in the mountains, so maybe it was a factor of having less sky to work with. And living in the city was never conducive to star-gazing.

Seeing shooting stars has a way of sparking the creative juices. It makes one think of what might be out there in the black. One recent night in particular had a particularly high showing of shooting stars – as I stood watching, listening to horses quietly munch their hay, I saw at least half a dozen streaks of light.² Then the image came to mind of a little girl and her father lying in the grass just outside their home watching a meteor shower, and a new story was born. Of course, given the way my mind likes to twist things, the story’s ending is a little bit disturbing.

But that’s a story for another day.

Keep your eyes open; ideas can come from anywhere.

My wife is slightly bitter – she has yet to see a single one.[back]
BTW – think about how fast an airplane appears to move across the sky and then think about how fast shooting stars move and you begin to get a sense for just how fast those little meteorites are moving![back]

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In the Mist

March 7, 2006 – 9:23 am

I love the fog. I think it is one of the most beautiful and most fascinating types of weather phenomena. I love walking in it and seeing how it dresses up and changes the world around me, how it makes the most familiar of landscapes seem strange and foreign. I love it best when the fog is thick enough that you can’t see more than 10 or 15 feet away but not so thick that you can’t find your way.

The past couple of mornings have found me pushing my way through the mist toward the barn to feed the horses. I love the way the beam of my flashlight is so clearly delineated in the fog, the way you can see the edges of that cone of light, almost like the beam is cutting a fine swath through the damp and the moisture hanging in the air.

It’s fun to watch the horses prance about in the fog once you let them out of their stalls and out into the paddock. The normally jittery and nervous one went straight to his hay and started eating, while the normally calm, collected one flitted about trying to get his bearings and check for danger. Apparently, the fog makes our horses behave counter to their usual personalities.

The fog cloaks an element of mystery, I think. Maybe that is why I love it so. It makes everything seem slightly surreal, a bit romantic, and somewhat exotic. It gives you the feeling that anything can happen, that creatures of legend and myth are waiting just beyond visual range to be discovered – dragons breathing plumes of sulphur breath, nymphs dancing in groves of trees, elves and gnomes moving silently about their elvish and gnomish business, centaurs gazing silently toward the heavens with their sage cogitations. Fantastic worlds might lie just behind that curtain of mist, and all it would take is for someone to pull that veil aside and open up new places to enjoy and savor.

The mystery and fantasy of fog, the playground of the imagination…

Posted in Speculative Fiction | Comments (2)

Scenes

February 24, 2006 – 4:27 pm

I don’t know how it is for other fiction writers, but usually the way I land on complete stories is by snagging scenes that spin about through my head and writing them down on paper. They’re incomplete snapshots of events that have not fully developed in my mind yet, but I know that if I do not write them down, I will ultimately lose them forever.

So, I write little bits and pieces here and there and set them aside, file them until a later date. I have discovered that, if I wait long enough, two or three (or more) of those scenes begin to connect. They form these little alliances, joining forces against me. Enough of this and I have no other choice – it must be put to ink. I finally have a complete story that has been built in front of me, completely separate from my own contrivance. In short, the story built itself from the random firing of synapses in my brain, and I am just the pen that gives permanent form to the specters of my mind.

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Cycling

February 24, 2006 – 1:49 pm

I find that I tend to go in cycles. For several weeks my mind will race through dozens of topics and issues, providing me an endless source of article fodder. Then I’ll hit a dry spot, a veritable intellectual desert in which no good idea will grow. It is these sandy, thirsty times where my only concerns are getting enough done at work and at home, getting bills paid, and getting enough sleep to survive the day. My mind wants new and interesting things to think about and write about, but there is nothing in that mental queue.

And so I end up writing about the fact that I have nothing to write about. Pretty pathetic, right? This has just been a very slow week for me, probably in part due to struggling to overcome some sort of head and chest congestion and not getting nearly enough sleep. My mind just doesn’t function well under those conditions. (Ironically enough, I’ve come up with three new short story ideas, which may end up landing in any one of a couple larger works I have percolating upstairs.)

So, I’ll touch out my net and fish for some ideas, even though historically my net comes up empty. I’d love suggestions of topics to write about, particularly since I have some time this afternoon to do so. I’m also working on hammering out a rough draft of a story snippet floating in my head right now that I might post up a little bit later.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

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New Worlds

January 25, 2006 – 1:00 pm

When taking the first steps into your new world as a speculative writer, it’s often a good idea to ignore the first things you ‘see’. It’s all too easy to get caught in the Land of ClichÃƒÂ©s, where the environment in which your story takes places resembles the generic mold for your stereotypical science fiction or fantasy story. Your first ideas about what this world should look like are not necessarily your best, and so it is important to take a second look in order to create a world that is both interesting and unique.

In his book Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card talks about how to create characters that are unique and rich. Part of this process involves taking an idea that might be common and giving it a good twist. Bring the idea in from an unexpected direction, giving it an element of surprise to the reader and thus making it more interesting to the story as a whole. For instance, in my previous article, I wrote about a landscape of hot cinder cones. That immediately brings to mind volcanic activity, which was surely what I intended there. However, had I developed the scene further, you might have found that the volcanic activity, and hence the cones themselves were the product of the war, whose existence was implied by the debris in the volcanic field. The war could have been so devastating that it shook the earth’s balance and brought forth the its fury. Or the volcanic field could have been created by some advanced technology brought by the invaders themselves. Or twist it further, and it could have been created by the aboriginal inhabitants in order to keep the invaders out or even to cover their headquarters or subterranean cities. The possibilities are endless.

It’s a continual challenge to come up with new and fresh ideas in my writing. I am an infant in writing, comparatively speaking, and so twisting ideas to make them unique and new is still very much a challenge, but I hope that as I write more, the process will become second nature and that my stories will be more interesting and enjoyable.

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Stockpile of Ideas

January 19, 2006 – 4:30 pm

I’ve seen a friend do this and I really like the idea. It allows for a certain level of creativity. Here’s what I want—regular readers, lurkers, and surfers-by, I am going to let you decide what I write about through your requests. It can be silly or serious, theological or philosophical, specific or general, your pick. Multiple requests are allowed—just keep it down to a somewhat reasonable number.

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone wants to read about!

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Pop vs. Classic

December 22, 2005 – 2:07 pm

During my commute home from work the other night, a song came on the radio that caught my attention after a minute or two. It was something in the pop rock genre, but what stood out to me about it was the fact that for the duration of almost the entire song, it never left the chord on which it began. The singer put some variation into his voice—but not much. The instrumentals behind him lent a little bit of interest to the song—but not much. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the whole song was the percussion—but not by much.

I kept waiting for the tune to progress to the next chord, to throw in a suspension, to modulate, to do—something. And it never did. The chorus did actually progress through the standard I, IV, V chords, but even those were pretty bland and were so covered up as to be almost unnoticeable. And while this is an extreme example of rock, it does put into sharp relief some of the things about popular music that I dislike.

I’ve been a musician for most of my life, playing piano since the 1st grade, and adding several other instruments to my repetoire over the years. I’ve played music by many of the greats—Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and many, many others. The music I grew up playing and listening to had a level of interest, complexity, technical difficulty, and artistry that you just can’t find today. Granted, there is a lot of popular music that I enjoy listening to, but if given a choice, I will opt for the classic works by the great composers of yesterday. There is simply a richness and depth to their work that I admire and that I find lacking in so many of today’s supposed ‘artists’. The creativity of the great composers is why I will pick classic over pop every single time.

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