“So you see, imagination needs noodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” ~ Brenda Ueland
Does your imagination noodle? Where do you find yourself getting odd and quirky bits of inspiration? How do you stimulate your creativity?
Signs inspire me. Here are a few that inspired stories or future stories:
Drive thru Redemption (on a recycling center)
Evoked Potential Laboratory (on a hospital door)
Built in 1790 for Jonathan Archer, Perukemaker (plaque on my house)
I like to think about my books while taking walks. In the shower is another place where inspiration might hit.
I like to scan through the Ancient Origins web site for ideas. There’s always something there to inspire me.
Yep–in the shower for me, too. Also, when I’m doing mundane work such as cataloging library books. 🙂
The boys in the basement. I often wake up with ideas that have formed during those half awake – half asleep moments during the night.
And I love the word, noodling. Look it up on a Google search: catching fish bare-handed. Reaching down there into the murky unseen and pulling up something fighting, thrashing, and with a life of its own.
I like to sit and stare,
sometimes just at air
or leaves, and bees, and trees, and seas
to ride my mind out there
I gaze into the physical
and see the maybe possible
inhale, ingest, absorb it all
and watch it come alive
The wavering of the flower petals
plead me release their faerie folk
and flit about the forest mists
and harken faerie tales spoke
Rising on an airy shaft
Sit I upon an eagle’s back
pinions driving deathly high
to bullwarks of Great Castle Sky
From such a lofty perch I watch
travails of man and beast and ought
which roam about Earth’s great expanse
living lives with turmoil wrought
as their paths God guides afoot
Kindly mum with suckling bairn
Doting dad with children plays
A kind old pair smile gently down
Their offspring dancing all around
The jealous nave that wants to steal
all that makes the happy heal
from the pains he causes them
and rend their smiles from stern to stem
The hero rides and razes he
who’s crimes decry indeed he be
the waster of the joyous soul
who needs be cast in darkest hole
And then my wife calls out to me
“Darling, it is time for tea”
She sits and asks,
“Whatcha doing?”
to wit says I
“Just some noodling”
Greatest noodling poem ever. Epic
The shower is one spot~
The commute is another ~
I’ll hear (or overhear), something in conversation or on the idiot-box and jot it down in a notebook ~ ditto in anything i might be reading~ then turn it over and over in the aforementioned shower or commute (or day-job staff beating), flesh it out in another notebook~ and try not let the new idea sidetrack the WIP.
Or did you mean that barehanded catfishing technique?
🙂
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