Reader Friday: Noodling

brenda-ueland

“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?

8 thoughts on “Reader Friday: Noodling

  1. 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)

  2. I like to scan through the Ancient Origins web site for ideas. There’s always something there to inspire me.

  3. Yep–in the shower for me, too. Also, when I’m doing mundane work such as cataloging library books. 🙂

  4. 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.

  5. 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”

  6. 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?

    🙂

    g

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