Hello Strangers,
It is officially spring! Has been for a week. Flowers are blooming with the leaves on the trees, bugs are back, jumping and buzzing above the wildflowers and grasses, and the sun has gotten some of its color back. It’s looking to be a beautiful season.
There are so many stories in nature. One area of the forest holds standing water, mosquitoes, and the moss which will continue to live despite the summer heat, another has a babbling brook and Black Eyed Susans that the deer come to drink at, still another holds a meadow, which somehow always manages to catch the sunlight, gold in the middle, and green at the edges from the filter of the leaves.
That’s an apt metaphor for story as well. I read somewhere that a lot of people today have stories inside them, but assume they have to turn them into novels. That simply isn’t true, there are a thousand ways to tell a story. They don’t even have to be written.
My favorite living artist is named Robin Sealark. She has an excellent YouTube channel under that name, and she was the person who taught me to experiment with everything in my art. To sketch, paint, and tell story with abandon. Art-a-thons and studies, realistic and stylized…She explained that in the first year of an art degree, students work in the studio for hours a day, months on end, trying everything. Acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, graphite, charcoal, chalk, crayons, sculpting, digital mediums…And then after they’ve tried everything, they specialize.
So, in a generation that has access to everything, do we limit ourselves?
I’ve started a journal, and everytime I have a story idea, I write it down. I think about it, and then I also add what medium I think it’s best suited to. Some of my stories are very visual, so I pick comics, graphic novels, or animations, (animations are obviously out of reach for a lot of creators, but I still like to list it as an option!) and some stories enter my mind and I imagine telling them around a campfire or as a bedtime story. These might be better suited to podcasts, songs, or a simply written script I can memorize and tell as a bedtime story, or at a campfire. Not everything has to belong to everyone.
You can write novels, short stories, poems, tv scripts, you can make mixed media stories like comics and graphic novels, you can make sculptures and paintings that encompass a story, dance, song, podcast, blog, youtube channel. You can cook stories! You can weave a story! Literally.
What I’m asking is that you don’t limit yourself before you’ve tried everything. Even the people who write medical textbooks and grants are telling stories. Marketing is storytelling. Landscape paintings are stories. Embrace all of the mediums. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a new way to create.
Happy Spring!
–Mabel
To All My Strangers 