It’s Everywhere!

My Creativity is sparked everywhere! There is no limit to where I cipher my ideas but to name a few it would have to be early mornings during a gym workout.

That usually leads to warrior fighting techniques or fitness lingo within my short stories and novels! There’s nothing like drifting off into imagination land while on the stair climber trying to work up a good sweat. Sometimes I people watch from being so high up and immediately think of story lines for those that attend the same gym. It sparks some pretty good story lines about struggling, achieving goals, or lifestyle changes. It may given me great ideas about new beginnings no matter what age, gender, height, etc. Weird right? But I love it!

It even stems from watching my kids do arts and crafts, especially when I’m chasing them down to prevent one of them from hurricane g each other with scissors. It usually leads to me harping on my personal experiences with my own children that spills over into the personalities of my protagonist’s offspring. I believe it keeps it real and relatable for the audience.

Don’t get me started on my time on the porcelain throne (toilet). Sometimes I cut the light off and imagine one of my characters suddenly stuck in traffic with a bad tummy ache that leads them to an offsite gas station where he or she meets their happily ever after because of a chance meeting. I think life works like that too! Sometimes our odd situations may lead to our happily ever after!

There’s nothing like nature to get your imagination running wild. Add a wolf labradoodle and it leads to ideas about a family and their beloved pet that somehow saved a marriage in your story or assisted a mentally challenged individual suffering from depression. It often leads to me describing the soft fur, human lime eyes, and cuddly nature of the pet that somehow rescued his or her owner from dire circumstances that could have gone terribly wrong. The sky is the limit!

Pillow talk with my husband has led to many of my story ideas too. Listening to him about his love and hate for his job has sparked ideas of writing about a man who’s searching for something in his current career that may he nonexistent. It turns out what the man was missing was the sense of belonging and simply just hating his job but too afraid to admit this to his friends and family. He doesn’t want to disappoint or offend those around him. See how that works? Crazy right? I don’t think so! This is real life happenings!

Let’s talk about friends! I am a live in counselor for both my family and my pet but my friends are a whole different story. Listening to some of their rendezvous or odd experiences at work and their personal life has been great for new material, such as a mother fighting for custody, a father struggling with celibacy, and a promiscuous woman in her 30’s that’s desperately waiting for love while refusing to hold out. The raw real mess reap life throws at each of them has done amazing things with helping me understand the uniqueness in the lives of others. They help me keep it real while remaining relatable to any audience. I love that they entertain my silly ideas while piling on a ton of background information that assist in my character building even if it’s not identical to themselves.

Work keeps me busy with coordinating, building, and assist in all facets of my job. The best part is organizing for just about every major and minor holiday to keep up morale. It causes my brain to switch gears and think about a story of a young professional trying to make it in the big city. Everyone sees her as happy go lucky but have no idea that she’s battling heartbreak from a pending divorce because her husband cheated with someone close to her. At work she wears a blissful mask while at home she’s trying to fight the need to cut herself.

I can’t forget the tube! Watching television has definitely challenged my creativity. I have a bad habit of creating alternate endings for shows, such as Game of Thrones. I immediately saw John Snow and Danerys together and they shared the iron throne and had little dragon babies. It’s also given me an idea to create an idea I call “Galatea Games” but it’s centered around an arena sort of like “Spartacus” but between powerful families that wish to rule the land in order to reunite them all for the greater good. There’s so much more to it of course but it helped shape it for me. Vikings, The Originals, Merlin, and Reign all us alternate endings in my head where they all lived happily ever after in the spin offs in my imagination. Sounds like fan fiction but honestly it’s a trip in my imagination that I throughly and vividly enjoy!

I have a million collages that I would sit and cut out the shape of figures on photos for hours with my oversized scissors. I somehow wrap it inside a short story where I speak about a protagonist and antagonist who used to be friends when they created a montage of memories of when the times were good before it all went down hill. When their friendship fell apart, so did the montage the two of them spent hours on. It starts your classic mean girls storyline just before a valuable lesson is learned. In my case, the antagonist of course ends up needing the protagonists in the end and being the good guy, the protagonist helps with no complaint. It’s better to be a good person and not match the energy or tone of an antagonists. That’s how I write all my stories! There’s always something to be learned.

One day while helping my mom craft on her jewelry venture, I discovered my love for mixing and matching various colors of stones to make the perfect bracelets for my five sisters. I instantly fell in love with the combinations and the way that each stone complemented the other. I became half-way obsessed with alternate outcomes which made me drift to alternate endings from past novels and short stories. There’s just so many ways to end a story and even open one! It even helped me write a short story where this young girl helped her mother sell jewelry in a local market so they could raise money to afford the expenses that were left behind by her deceased father. The mother couldn’t work because she refused to leave her young daughter unattended. Their way of not only keeping the lights on but spending time together was doing something the mother loved while creating a young passion in the daughter who grew up to own her business in a city her mother always wanted to love before she took her last breath. Don’t get me started on the various ways we used her sewing machine to create also that fit my children’s little faces while designing mask that fit adults. We patched and prodded each one until there was no fabric left. We even began using my dog’s handkerchiefs to keep it interesting.

Quarantine has been an interesting motivator in itself. I actually began writing during the pandemic and have been obsessed since. Not being able to go out many places due to restriction we’ve become creatively festive in our own right that’s helped me begin and end stories with uncommon endings. For example, my son has a plastic car he would climb in and constantly tilt his head down as his focus was on his phone. My husband literally taped a phone mount to the plastic car to make him feel like he was in an actual car. It made me think about writing a short of a struggling artist who’s mirror was being held up by duct tape along with a few missing handles but he still rode in his old beat up Ford two door back and forth to work everyday in hopes that he would land the job of his dreams. The story was about patience and trusting that things would happen when it’s your season but the important thing was not to give up and weather the storm. Ideas are limitless when you open your eyes to what’s already around you.

It’s amazing what transpires from simply spending time doing something you’re not accustomed to. It could very well lead to satisfying your temperament while finding a new hobby that helps with your absolute favorite one, writing!

Food! Yes, food has shaped my creativity in ways that I could go on and on about. I love cooking and even wrote a short story about a college student’s love for culinary arts. It’s what kept her family together over the years as the love for food ran through her bloodline. Maybe a little too much because she feared for the health of those closest to her because of their terrible diet. So, she strayed from her dream to become a chef to specializing in nutrition while focusing on ways she could help her obese community by providing health and wellness advice. In the end she combined her love for food with her new found passion of wellness and encouraged her community through education and her presence.

Sounds a bit strange but it was very moving to write as obesity and stubbornness runs in my family. Food allowed me to put myself in the shoes of one of my characters while tackling concerns I have in my everyday life. Not only that, I’ve described entrees that I’ve had or cooked in real life to help my creativity flourish beyond imagination. I often overdue my desire for the unhealthy though, such as overindulging in chocolate cake. Literally, death by chocolate cake as I nearly collapse from the sugar rush.

Last but not least, music. My absolute favorite creative pass time is surrounded my soundtracks from various genres and generations. The tunes just speak to me from their tone, bass, and treble. I get so wrapped inside of the bottom line of the songs to where I’ve often left reality for such a period that I draw attention.

It’s scary freaking exhilarating! Music moves me to a point where I’ve written adult sex scenes all the way down to heinous acts and everything in between.

There’s been times where I’ve been able to vividly describe a dance party, a wedding, and funerals in some cases depending on the overall story line just by plugging in my headphones and letting go. If my own life had a soundtrack it would definitely speak to my lack of control over my own creativity. There’s no way I could pinpoint just one thing in my life that’s helps me create masterpieces or placing words on a page period. It comes and goes but I’ve never known it to lead me astray. Every song tells a a story which I translate into my own with the help do the artist’s vibe. I love it!

I went from struggling to making book covers to easily making one in under 10 minutes that I was proud of. I’ve made many authors book covers and it has given me storyline ideas just given the theme of the book covers I’ve made for myself and others.

There’s something to be taken from every experience regardless of the circumstances that surround you. There’s just no way to choose just one thing or situation that helps me create stories that I love. I’ve created my own happiness through everyday life while sharing my talent with friends, family, and strangers. There’s no telling where my next inspiration would come from and neither will I try to figure it out. There’s really no need to. It’s everywhere!