Beautiful Imagery and our best work

images

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

Imagination and Imagery are intimately connected. It’s the power of combining images, transforming them into our particular reality, and even going beyond that.

Writing is constructing images in our heads and in our readers minds.

While building a story we recur to different strategies to visualise how characters, locations, and objects, will appear to our readers.

I do believe that, all that we can see in our minds will translate into a page in the most effective way we can imagine, if we just put the work behind it.

I also believe that usually this happens in ways we can’t perceive objectively. It’s kind of a shadow work that occurs inside our minds, fuelled by all the collected inspirations.

The act of describing what we are envisioning, letting what we absorb come through, will make reading a lively experience.

This means building ideas about how the elements will be, and master its materialisation on the page. Whatever the story, in whichever genre we fancy.

How we find imaginative inspiration?

Some of us, writers and imagery builders of sorts, have a fondness for reading and imagine things in our own way.

Sometimes, this ability gets us to have a book turned into a movie just because the imagery used was totally wrong from what we had envisioned.

Others, find it useful to look at correlated art works and give our imagination a hand at picturing worlds, creatures and even human faces.

There are a few theories about this brain ability of ours, categorising people into types of learners, just by figuring out our abilities to retain information and, therefore, use it in creative ways, accordingly to our main senses of vision, hearing and touching.

I found that, for me a mix and match of all of these, work in different projects and situations. So I learned to use visual aids, and well as hearing and touching.

In some projects I use music. In others, drawings and pictures. With more, or less, emphasis on each aid, according to what I feel is most needed for me to capture the full experience I need.

Because to learn about these characters, and this world, and these objects and locations, I need to attune myself to their particularities. And this is only possible if I keep my sources of inspiration in an expanded mode. Always looking, always alert, always integrating fun little snippets of information that might seem to be just there for the taking. Just so I have some places from which to draw inspiration from.

Where do I find some inspirational imagery?

Just looking at other people’s rendition of something, a picture, a drawing, a digital art work, a description, a capture of some sort of inspirational material, allows me to let me own imagination guide me into my own world building, with all it entails. Browsing through Pinterest, DeviantArt, a Google search on Images tab, can get me some much needed help on figuring out some writerly things.

How do I use it in my writing process?

I use it for inspiration, to build up my mental muscles on the much needed imagery.

Exposing myself to beautifully composed images, to gruesome battle outcomes, to twirls of abstract imagination, will get me content enough to start thinking about my own creative processes in my stories.

Also, I use it for writing exercises.

To have a prompt, and to build upon that little morsel of imagery is a pleasure, and alleviates me from having to start with the dreaded blank page feeling.

Just like painting uses references, the  writing practice also can, and should, do it. Imagery serves us as guides in this unthreaded wordy land.

Is it beneficial to my writings?

Yes. It is indeed. My imagination needs all the aid she can get. My writing efforts benefit from everything I throw at them. All the little unsuspected efforts we can make to help us write more and better are welcome.

If we find a notebook full of clippings is the way to go, we should try it out; or a mood board hanging on the wall; a Pinterest album full of scary pictures; a reference book on imagery; a subscription to a travel magazine; or any other way of collect those images we will be recurring to intentionally, in order to make our writing process smoother and more inspired.

Standing in the shoulders of giants has its downside?

Do not copy. Do not steal. Do not use without permission. Do not go into that unimaginative, hurtful, dishonourable lane.

Reconnect the dots of all you have learned and add to the work already done. Be inventive, resourceful, creative in your own right. You can do the most beautiful, your own, work. And it will feel good to do so.

Be careful of the difference between gathering inspiration, to work out added value, and the already mentioned problem above.

Gather from all types of different sources and think: I am the sieve through which all comes in, and only a small combined part of it mesh and comes out.

Allow myself to be the changing factor, the added value, the combinatory and creative force behind whatever I create.

Will it be easy?

Is anything worthwhile easy? I don’t think so.

Was any of those drawings easy to make? Any of those books we read? Any of those creative breakthroughs?

Easy and Worthwhile are opposites, aren’t they? 

Having these processes available to tap into, allowing new inspiring imagery and information to come through, working out the effective ways they can serve my writing efforts, trying to be receptive to all inspiring tendrils is part of the fun.

All we can do is allow our minds to translate into our work the images we had envisioned. All we must do is ensure that the reading experience will be the best we can make it. And that all these inspirational processes work out for the best in each page we write.

So that our reader truly gets what we were aiming for: the best story possible. 

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

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Considerations about Building Worlds

building worlds

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

World Building is hard, fun, messy and an inspiring cluster of moments to be had, while writing a story.

To create a full, well developed, verisimilar picture of a new society, in whichever form and size, means we have to be ready to explore.

And we explore by imagining some complex interactions, rules and possibilities of functions and purposes. We explore by asking ourselves ‘What if?

World Building is also very fun, and we can have a great time imagining and developing some physical, personal and social landscapes in order to make a certain story work.

Building a new world usually means that we want it to be special and unique.

But sometimes, we have all of these ideas, already seen in other books, series and movies, that makes us doubt if we are indeed writing something new or even good enough. Making us doubt of what we intended to create, and getting us not to put enough time in working out the particulars of that special world.

How to come up with remarkable ideas for our World Building?

Learning about other people’s creative processes might give us a glimpse on how their new ideas came to be. It might help us discovering our own process to invent our own strategies to uncover our imaginative process.

I suggest that you watch the documentary ‘Abstract, the Art of Design’ for a great glimpse of other people’s creative processes.

But, more frequently than not, we see their processes as a confluence of different factors, including their own unique reality and life experiences. And, let’s face it, we can’t replicate that. All we can do is live our own life experiences and use them the best we can.

So, looking to other people’s creative processes teach us an invaluable lesson: Use your beliefs, inner thoughts and fears to create our Story Worlds.

There’s a constant need to look around and analyse how we see the world, how we react in certain situations, what we believe in and how those beliefs have changed over time.

There is great potential here. Not just for the things we would like to advocate in behalf of, while writing our stories, but also looking frankly at our hidden agendas, those thoughts we find uneasy and some of them even shameful.

And then, there is fear.

Fear can be our ultimate telltale sign that we need to work on that through a story. Not as a way to deal with it, even if it could be that, but as a spark of inspiration from which to build upon.

When we are writing Fantasy, being in a dystopian novel for example, we may construct a more believable story if we tap into our own experiences and thoughts.

I guess we all have came into contact some pretty messed up world views, peer pressure, or non-sensical beliefs. We might as well put them under a new light and scrutinise if any of those would fit our story just right.

Building a brand new world is, and cannot be in other way, connected to how we experience the reality we live in.

We may set the action in a far away galaxy, in a totally different body, or even in a totally different existential and corporeal plane, but we all start from the same reality in which we live in.

My father used to say that “all the things that exist are from this world. We cannot invent anything that we hadn’t already seen or experienced in this world.

I agree with that. We can only reimagine what we have seen or experienced in some way. And all of it came from this world we live in.

We cannot think outside-the-box, if we have no ideia of what exists beyond it’s confinements. For example in sci-fi stories, assuming there could be something existing outside what we know, and having clear notions that there are rules to the functioning of this world in which we live in, we can only extrapolate into how things could be in other worlds.

Initially, we draw inspiration from the knowable in order to build a new world, somehow inventive, by reapplying the old and conveying things in a new format. And then we go deeper into the rabbit whole, if we can. We conjugate different ideas, crisscrossing from distant experiences and knowledges.

It’s not just having some knowledge but learning to recognise it’s potential and integrate it.

We use what we’ve got, specially if it’s a cross between a chihuahua and a fountain pen, or an ugly feeling and an online game, or chicken legs and a house foundations. Any one of these fortuitous connections may give us that idea that will make our story special.

World Building doesn’t mean just physical location. It envolves people, traditions, cultures, belief systems, interactions, associations, objects, daily tasks… all of the things that we experience in our own existences adapted into this new world that we are creating.

Because a martian would never walk like an earthling, would he? Or an addict would never rationalise some random thought in the same way that someone without that particular addiction would.

There are different knowledges to be pursued and other connections to be made between the simplest thing in that particular world. And our job as storytellers is to make those connections if we can.

So on we go into other worlds in order to discover our own.

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

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