Whether you want to write that best-seller novel, an award winning short story or an invaluable ‘How to’ book,’ you’ll need ideas to kick start your writing.
In this series, we’ll look at different idea inspiring devices, starting with: Walking in Graveyards.
Here’s why:
1. The science bit: Walking releases the feel good hormones to help you feel more confident and open to your creativity.
2. Simply walking away from your computer and desk with all the detritus of your online life, frees up all that brain space.
3. Step into a graveyard and like me, you’ll hopefully, be engulfed by the calm stillness. The air changes as you breath in the reverence that forms a sanctuary for those who’ve moved on to a different plane.
4. Start strolling around to search for both the familiar and the new in a different light. Notice how your all the senses you need for writing, appear:
Sight:
Look at how low branches of the oat tree seems to form wings around a particular headstone
Smell:
The sticky sweet scent of amber from the tree trunk
Touch:
The dry, rough bark and maybe wonder how it might feel on the skin of a young man’s back
as he makes love to another against the imperious oak.
Sound:
The terrible scream of a Screech Owl,
the wind whipping around the graveyard, knocking over vases of wilted flowers and kicking up the path’s gravel.
What might the dead tell you? Find a tombstone whose inscription moves you, leading to more questions.
Here’s an example loosely based on one I saw:
John Buchanan
Father to Paul Buchanan, who lost his life in 1861 at seventeen years.
Rest Together in Eternity
You might ask yourself, how did Paul die? Did he suffer a disease, an accident – or something more sinister?
What happened to his mother?
In her blog, The Creative Penn, Joanna Penn talks about writing in graveyards. Do check it out. She’s a great baton holder for new and established writers.
Now think again of seventeen-year-old Paul. Was it he who felt the bark of the Yew, raw and sharp as it etched into the naked skin of his back?
A story is blooming as surely as the primrose amongst the weathered headstones.
Put what you can into your phone or notebook.
Your story is almost written.
And for the next one, take a walk along a riverbank or anywhere that lets you hear the whisper of your writer’s voice in nature.