Running with the theme of letting the imagination run with ideas, I remember something that an old friend once told me. I was frustrated then with having little time to write (ironically, I think back to that period now and wish I had that much time….funny how everything is relative that way), and found what little creative spark I could find squashed by my day job. That was before I had been able to find the interdisciplinary melding points in what I did, and I was looking for some way to let everything fall into place.
His advice to me was to let everything be “grist for the writing mill.”
It was difficult to take his advice then, but in the years since, I’ve began to appreciate his wisdom. One of my resolutions for the new year (or was it the year before…?) was to make time to work on some side projects, projects for which I had good ideas but have never set aside to time to truly develop. Those sorts of projects, I think, are the best sometimes for getting the writing spark lit. As Karen and I have had some quite interesting experiences with living arrangements over the past year, I remembered a shelved project that has been sitting on my desktop for a bit. It’s a collection of humorous experiences that we’ve had at different apartments since we’ve been married. It’s one of those projects for which I’ll very likely never seek publication, but that’s worth compiling if only for a family memoir of sorts to be a source of good memories later.
Or, perhaps the adventures that I recount there will end up on these virtual pages. Who knows?
I think that I’ll carve out some time in the next week sometime to outline some of our experiences and begin writing them down. It will get me back in the frame of mind in which words are flowing out onto the page, at least, and that can lead to all sorts of wonderful things.