Vision - Exploring Your Writing Through Your Senses

Photo by Daniil Kuželev

How do our senses influence our creativity? We use our available senses all the time. We touch, taste, feel, smell, and listen. Our creative selves swim in a sea of senses. The question is, can we use this to be our better selves? Let’s start and become keen observers and writers.

At the beginning of the year, we imagine what that year will bring. According to the dictionary vision “is a special sense by which the qualities of an object (as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived and which is mediated by the eye.”

What if using this special sense, we look at our lives in a novel way? My eyesight is not the best. When I bought new glasses the world came back into view. I didn’t know what I had been missing. Not that everything sparkled; I couldn’t help but notice that I needed to revisit cleaning my apartment. But the fuzziness I had been living with disappeared, and the edges came back into focus. I rediscovered a new sense. I saw the world differently.

As artists, we may follow a daily routine. But routines can block other possibilities. We become stale. Our creativity does not blossom. Our words bore us. And the music we play has no feel to it. Goals you wanted to pursue, languish.

You are writing a book on whales, but what really lives in you is a play about your family. Each day, each week, and every year you put the play on your goal list. The struggle is to break out of the safe zone and do what may scare, but also move you.

What can be done? Use vision differently. Don’t create your future based on the old dreams. Discover something new. Visualize an adventure for yourself, one that includes new vistas and new dreams never dreamt before, or the ones you have been afraid to fulfill.

I know what it’s like to live with limited vision. I have my dreams, the ones I hold on to and bring out each year like old memories. It is so hard to part with them. It is easier to hang on to the familiar than to admit a dream no longer has merit for the person you have become. When I search for meaning in outside influences, I know that what I am pursuing may not big enough for me. Like an exercise program, stretching beyond the creative comfort zone seems so hard to do. Even if I am not there yet, I know it is possible. I know it is possible for you too. Follow your unique and beautiful vision to create a wonderfully creative life.

Creative Writing Prompts: Vision

• In a safe place or with the help of a friend blindfold yourself. Experience the world without your sight. How do your other senses come into play? Do you rely on one more than the other? Walk around and touch things. Sniff the air. Explore the world using the other senses.

• Use your ears. How do things sound when you can’t see? If you have an escort, walk outside and feel the air and listen to the surrounding sounds.

• What did you learn? Did you hear, taste, or smell differently? How do things look now that you have your sight back?

• Find five different things each day. As an example, go to work and look at your normal environment. Look at the ordinary things, such as your desk, the water cooler, the stairwell, and then find what is extraordinary about them. What does the ceiling look like? Notice the color of the walls.

• Create a story using your fresh sight. Add as many visuals from your everyday life as you can. Have the story be as visual as you can make it.

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All works are the original content of Sandra Lee Schubert.

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