Journey to Creativity
Exploring Your Writing
Through Your Senses
By Sandra Lee Schubert-
Creator,
Writing
for Life:
Creating a Story of Your Own
Introduction
Welcome to Journey to Creativity: Exploring Your Writing Through Your Senses.
Enjoy your journey to creativity.
You do not have to be a professional writer to take pen to paper. Writing is an activity anyone can do at any time.
We carry our writer’s toolkit with us at all times. Our own bodies are living, breathing founts of creativity.
Suffering from writers block? Can’t come up with a line to start your story? By using your senses inspiration is as close as your nose, your eyes, or your ears.
Walk into any flower shop and you are surrounded by colors, scents and textures. The silkiness of a rose petal, the rough edge of an aloe plant, the prickliness of cactus can start you on a creative adventure.
Do some people-watching. Observe how people move, the clothes they wear, and the sound of their voices. You can create a story from just one interaction on a street corner.
How to use this book:
The essays are designed to be short. You can read them through, try some of the creative prompts and start writing. As you travel through your senses you will be building a creative repertoire of sense details to use any time. Let your imagination go and enjoy the journey.
Vision
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
~ Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of US (1856 - 1924)
How do our senses influence our creativity? Making our way through the world we use all our senses. We touch, taste, feel, smell and listen. We can't get away from all of this stimulation. Our creative selves swim in a sea of senses. The question is can we use this to be our better selves?
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. ~ Andre Gide, French critic, essayist, & novelist (1869 - 1951)
The beginning of each year we envision what that year will look like for us. According to the dictionary vision "is a special sense by which the qualities of an object (as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived and which is mediated by the eye."
What if using this special sense we look at our lives in a new way? My eyesight is not the best. When I got my new glasses the world came back into view. I didn't know what I had been missing. Not that everything sparkled; I couldn't help but notice that I needed to revisit cleaning my apartment. But the fuzziness I had been living with disappeared and the edges came back into focus. It was like a sense I didn't have before was discovered.
You are an artist and your life is what you are creating. Bring light when you can. As Goethe said on his deathbed, his last words:
'More light!' ~ Jan Phillips, Author, The Museletter
As artists we may follow the same daily routine. Our routine can blind us to other possibilities. We can become stale. Our art does not grow, our words bore even us, and the music we play has no feel to it. There are goals you wanted to pursue, but you are stuck in this state of ennui. You are writing a book on whales for example but what really resides in you is a play about your family. Each day you plod along joylessly struggling to find the words. Each day, each week, and every year you put the play on your goal list. Words fail you. The struggle is to create a new vision for yourself, bravely entering a new world in which you find true joy in creating.