I’m not whole unless I’m feeding my inner artist, and since I knew I wanted to be a “story writer” since I was 3 years old, I’ve had many decades to train my brain to look for story ideas, projects, creative potential everywhere I looked.
While life does what it does, and a rough decade of life (severe understatement) has put a lot of rust on my writing habits, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m at my best when I’m working on a creative project and I never know what type will catch my attention.
- A new book idea?
- A screenplay simmering in the back of my brain bubbling up to the surface?
- Short Story?
- Poem?
- An itch for a book of poems, a series of creative non-fiction essays, something entirely different?
- Maybe a new blog focusing on something NOT keyword or marketing based?
I never quite know what the next project will be, and in this case, the idea come from a free stock photo website of all places.
From a Gaming Blog – An Online Fiction Project
Customizing pictures or illustrations gets pretty expensive. Finding good stock photo sites is also hard, which is why I’m a fan of Pixabay.
So what happens when you have a gaming blog like Assorted Meeples where you’re covering topics like magic, fantasy-adventure, board games, and more? Something like ‘Angry Ogre’ or ‘Heavy Armor Master’ doesn’t tend to get a lot of hits on stock photo sites.
Which means you have to get creative with words and descriptions. I typed in “Epic” just to see what I would get…and I was impressed.
Many of them didn’t fit with any topic I would be writing about…but there were some beautiful pictures and photoshops and art pieces in there that I wanted to save.
So an idea hit:
What if I created a multi-chapter story, each chapter based on the pictures I liked from the keyword “Epic” and done in order…even if the pictures next to each other appeared from completely different styles or genres?
Shane, hitting the quirky type of idea that tends to stick for him
That’s the entire basis of this creative project!
I typed the word “Epic” into the search bar for Pixabay and looked through the results, ending with 47 amazing pictures that came up in the search result that grabbed me, wowed me, or inspired me…so those pictures, in order, are going to make up this long, strange, multi-genre story!
No looking ahead, no long-term plan, when I start a new section I load the picture at the top, study it, enjoy it, and let those creative muscles fly.
I’m not going to have too many rules, but there are a few basics I have:
- Each picture gets its own chapter/post, whatever you want to call it
- I must write them in chronological order – the order they came up based on the search results
- There must be some type of thread or connection running through all the stories – no unrelated short story collections or “Ha, just a dream!” moments
- All of them together should creative one long narrative
That’s it. No word limits, no necessary balance, just giving each picture it’s time in the spotlight and figuring out along the way what exactly this writing project actually is.
And I must say, I’m excited about it!
So thanks for stopping in and I hope you enjoy this!
Pixabay Epic Chapter 1: ? – Coming Soon!