Snowy Observations and Wishing for Spring

Last Friday I had a doctor's appointment to check in over lab results. While I waited in the exam room for the doctor to see me, I looked out the back window. The snow that had just fallen two days earlier was bright and largely unbroken - beautiful. I wrote this in my handy-dandy Moleskine notebook:

The exam room is snow-bright - the vast sheet of white behind the building reflects ths sunlight mercilessly. Twin lines of tracks, evidence someone blazed their way through the thigh-deep snow, criss-cross the field, reaching out toward a loading dock in one direction and the road in the other. Nearby a gazebo sits shrouded beneath a white crown. The tracks pass it by.

The snow-sheet, painfully brilliant to behold even with eyes squinted partly shut for protection, is beautiful, broad and unbroken except for the criss-crossing paths. Its surface is lightly decorated with crinkles from wind-blown snow drifting across its surface. The shadows of overhead power lines, barely visible above, stroke across the sheet.

A man in a Day-Glo yellow jacket and hood comes out to scrape ice from the loading dock's driveway. Against the backdrop of the snow-sheet he looks tiny, insignificant.

I never seem to get tired of writing about snow. I should use stuff like this in the story idea I had last month. I sure have written enough of it lately. Thankfully our forecast seems largely free of snow for the next week or so. I've enjoyed this winter stuff, I suppose, but I'm ready for spring. A friend online mentioned being eager for warm weather, the scent of freshly-mown grass, and birdsong. I second that. I can't wait until I can go out for a walk with only a light jacket, or hop on my bike and ride up to the bird sanctuary again.

Meditations on Snow

I went out and took some more pictures of the snowy landscape. It's not often we get this much snow anymore. We had several inches on Saturday, and now we're getting a lot more. It's also drifted a bit, so even with nearly knee-high boots on I couldn't go far out into the backyard without risking getting snowy wet pants. So I wandered around the front of the house and took photos of the front yard.

Snow is so beautiful when you're watching it fall, seeing it collect on the branches of trees and plants. It collects, like water does, but in such a different and elegant way. Powdery snow sits in clumps on the dead flowers of my butterfly bush, bowing the branches, forming little rounded pyramids of snow. It lays along the limbs of the trees, painting their dark bark with a bright highlight. It gathers along fences, piles up on the posts. It perches along the lines of my washline, occupying those spaces where the spiders set up shop in the warmer months. It balances precariously on the smallest surface, clinging until it's knocked down or swept aside by a passing creature or the action of the wind. The snow wraps the world in a thick, cold blanket of white which seems so very comforting to me as I sit here in my warm room with my morning cup of tea, watching it tumble to earth in little fluffy blobs.

The wind is picking up a bit, so now the snow is not so much drifting to the ground as swirling that way, pushed around and down, forced to fly in harsh diagonals instead of floating lazily along. It's my favourite kind of snow to watch: the big flakes that I can watch individually, following one after another with my eyes as they describe a path from the top of my window down to where the snowy ground makes them vanish from my view. It's less enjoyable when the wind is authoritatively shoving the poor fluffy flakes this way and that instead of letting them find their own way.

Later on I'll be out shoveling it off my driveway, so I'll likely have an entirely different set of observations about the snow from that perspective. But for now, I'm inside, warm, with tea, listening to classical music on Beethoven Radio and enjoying the show Nature is putting on today. I give it two thumbs up.

Creativity and the perfect writing space

So what to write about today? The world is a sunny, bright, white wonderland of snow today. A wonderland by my description perhaps most because I don't need to go out in it. On my desktop is a scene of tropical sandy warmth and if I close my eyes I can feel the sun, hear the ocean, smell the salt on the air.


One of Jack Heffron's prompts invites the writer to envision his or her perfect writing space. Blocked writers often say things like, "If only I had the money to redo the guest bedroom, I'd turn it into a writing space. Then I could write." It's easy to fall into the trap of "if only". Many writers think that they have to quit their jobs and move to the country or the mountains to write a novel. A trip through National Novel Writing Month will cure them of that belief. I've learned that showing up is the most important action when it comes to writing. A writer friend of mine calls it "Ass In Chair", or "AIC". You sit down and you write. It doesn't matter if you're in the mood or not. You don't need to be in the mood to write. If it's sunny, you write. If it's cloudy, you write. If a foot of snow has fallen on your house, you write, then you go shovel snow for a while. When that's done, you come back and write some more.

It can be hard to face the blank page/screen, but all you need to do is put something down. Make a mark. Then make another one. Pretty soon your Muse will come out to play. Can you envision her peeking around the corner, wondering what all that writing is about? She's too curious to stay away for long.

My ideal writing space would be warm and brightly lit, probably in a little cottage by the ocean. I have a backdrop for my computer of a view out of a whitewashed window, framed with light drapes, looking out on a pristine white beach and a crystal blue sea. With a little imagination I can be in that place, that imaginary place of comfort and perfect organisation (as my real-world workspace is a bit cluttered at the best of times), and allow it to refresh me. The sound of seabirds calling drifts through like music, timed by nature to dance along the rush of the ocean up to the shore. I sit at the window with a notebook of thick, beautiful paper, a stunningly crafted fountain pen in my hand, or perhaps at an old-fashioned typewriter, which, in my fantasy, is as easy to type upon as the laptop keyboard I'm really using. My Muse drifts in, etherial in a flowy white dress, and smiles benevolently on me as I write, ideas spilling like wine overflowing a crystal goblet.

But alas, in the real world it's very much winter time. Here it's -3 degrees Centigrade, and to my internal thermometer, anything below 10 C is too cold. And while it's bright and sunny, it's a bit too bright. The sunlight reflects off the newly-fallen snow and can be offensive to eyes that aren't prepared for it. Here in my landlocked town, I won't be hearing the ocean anywhere but in my memory or from a disc of recorded surf sounds. I can warm the place up, put on an extra sweater, bring back the sensations of my fantasy writing space in my mind. With the CD running, I might even begin to think I was in that little cottage, peacefully nestled against the beach, with nothing to interrupt my creativity.

You don't need an ideal space to begin writing. Writing needs only a few tools, which are easily accessible to nearly everyone. People who take time off to write their novels find they suddenly have a lot of other things to do that aren't writing their novels.

So sit down and take half an hour to write something today. It doesn't matter if you call yourself a writer or not. Human beings are, by our very nature, creative beings. You don't have to write great things. You can make poetry with a grocery list. Capture a moment of your kids' lives in a little vignette. Imagine a wonderful place to be. Describe it with words. Don't let the unique ideas in your head get away. We all have interesting things floating about in our heads. Grab one and capture it on the page. You'll be glad you did.