A Tip For The Writers
Keep meaningful objects.
At the moment, I have a silver ring I got at a Renaissance fair. It’s a silver band, cast so that the outside has flowers–embossed?–into it.
Why am I talking about this? It is a meaningful object. It represents an entire setting in which I would have knowledge to use in writing, should I ever need to write up a Renaissance fair. Perhaps one of my characters would end up with the same ring… only different. For them, the magical power would definitely not be the ability to write about a Renaissance fair! It might even be that the character went to the fair with her (or his, if the ring is masculine enough) friends and is sentimentally attached to it because he/she doesn’t get out much, or…
You get the idea.
It doesn’t have to be a ring, and it doesn’t have to be from a specific place–it could simply remind you of somewhere you’ve been, so that when you’re stuck between point A and point C, and have a vague idea what you’d like to happen at point B but have no place in which it could happen…
…it’s better to go to a Renaissance fair than an alien spaceship. Most of the time, anyway. If you’re running off an Improbability Generator, either would work, because you’ll go to both anyway.
And it doesn’t have to remind you of a place. It could represent a person, or an event, or even an emotion. But your objects need to have meaning. Don’t worry about becoming a little packratty. Keep a shoebox full of things. Old notebooks full of scribbly drawings and phrases you like.
They mean something to you, and it doesn’t just mean that you need to go to the Salvation Army sometime soon.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 19th, 2011 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Fun Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
