Tag Archives: snow

Spring is coming…well to most of the country, we have snow here in the Pacific Northwest… and once Spring does arrive I intend to get outside a bit and enjoy the environment. Getting outside is one of the best things you can do for the writer in you. We live solitary lives, mostly cramped up inside our writing spaces, pen or keyboard at one hand and a bottle of vitamin D in the other. For those of you who don’t understand the vitamin D reference, our bodies need this and usually get it from being out in the sun. (For those of you who don’t understand the sun reference…well…you have larger issues and we will talk about that later.) Anyway, because of the way we have to live our lives it makes it that much more important to get outside.

Let me say that if there were a Master’s Degree in talking one’s self out of going anywhere, I would have three. I often make a list of things I need to get done and then quickly, and quite absently, mark off anything that has to do with stepping out the front door. I admit it…I am headed to hermit-ville, in the worse way, most weeks. I love to write and it is where I am most comfortable. I am a “people” person and have been quite social most of my life, but as I get older I find that the people I want to spend time with most are the ones in my stories. This is good and bad all at the same time.

While staying in and working might make me a more persistent writer I am ignoring the very thing that makes any writer a really good one…life. The basic themes in any good story can be found in nature herself. Getting out and listening to the ocean or the wind refreshes our minds and makes us rethink the themes of our stories. It reminds us that, without the wind, the rain, a few thunderstorms and perhaps even some snow, our stories are stale and non-environmental if you will. We need nature to remind us to breathe. We also need to get outside so that we can be reminded that there is more to life than a keyboard and that trees are not just something on the internet. We also need to remember that, as writers, the one thing we need in order to ensure that our readers can relate to our stories is a sense that what we write is the product of experience of some kind. If all you ever experience is the four walls of your writing space your readers will pick up on that because they won’t be able to hear the wind in the background of your story…and every story needs a little wind to make it sail.

© The Writer’s Advice, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.