MONDAY MUSINGS—MY MAGPIE MIND

All my life I've been a Magpie collecting shiny bits of information and storing them. As a little kid those ideas played out in drawings or illustrated stories—like a comic book. Sometimes those ideas just created a world in my brain and played. Other times the ideas were used as pretend adventures to be played out by my brothers and I. When I brought my brothers into the story they embellished and fleshed out the ideas and we had days of fun with the results.

Wonder what's going on over there?

Where many people would see a pretty piece of landscape, my mind would react to the beauty visually but then it would gallop off into storylines of hidden people and animals living there. The shadow between two trees would become a door into another world. One place we lived had a honeysuckle caves in the woods with paths moving between them and they were fun to explore physically. Some of them were quite large and big enough to, with a little work, create living quarters. Mentally, in my imagination, this is where all sorts of interesting creatures lived—faeries lived there, you see, or the people who were magic and could turn into animals. I was playing paranormal shapeshifter games long before it became a genre. But those tunnels and caves became paths to different worlds and people.

Ah, that's the perfect shade of green...how do I get it 

home? Wait, was that a mermaid I just saw? No, maybe a 

lady with 

a sword? 

My mind has always worked like this. Even today, when I take a walk there is a part of my mind that sees stories and snippets of adventures. Granted, the ideas aren't in the forefront of my mind like they were as a preteen or teen but they’re still there. Many times those places I've walked or things I've observed in my walks will play out some adventure, later, in my dreams. To me it’s normal and I thought everyone had that moving video in their head, lol!

As I got older I started writing down some of those vivid dreams. I have notebooks of ideas and snippets of scenes I've written. When I got my computer I would store those outlines, ideas, scenes in a writing file. My writing files are quite large and filled with fascinating, to me, research on things I've seen in dreams or just thought about.  I’m inquisitive about many things and my files reflect that curiosity.

My inner magpie is a collector of lots of shiny ideas and some of them have made it to a basic story outline, others have not. I say outline but its more like a paragraph of storyline and some character sketches and maybe glimpses of the world I’m playing in. Any teacher would raise an eyebrow at my use of the term, outline, but it works for me. When I go beyond flashes of ideas

and create a basic storyline it moves from my writing file to it’s own file and my magpie flies around collecting more shiny bits of  research to add to it.

Yep, I have a curious magpie mind. J

How about you? How do you collect your story
ideas. 

Do you write down ideas and file them or let them ping around your mind for awhile?

Wednesday: I have the incomparable Kathryne Kennedy sharing her new book and her very cute puppy with us.