Snow Can Trigger Your Writing

 Writers often lament the fact that they don't know what to write about. Stuck for a new idea. Yet, story ideas are swirling around us all the time just like snowflakes drifting downward from above. Snow is a great topic. We had several inches here on Saturday. Our first snow of the winter.

Watching snow blanketing our world often moves us to write a poem. For some reason, we forget the cold, the wet, the shivers we have, and only the beauty of a snowstorm remains. Think of all the wonderful adjectives there are to describe this little piece of nature. Try writing a poem using snow as the topic.

Snow also brings many memories of childhood experiences. Times when we went sledding, ice skating, or shoveling the family driveway and sidewalks. Times when there were snowball fights and the building of snowmen. Did you run inside and grab a carrot from the fridge for the snowman's nose? Was it a struggle to walk to school in the aftermath of a big snow? Did your mom make you bundle up so much to play in the snow that you could hardly walk? Was there hot chocolate waiting for you after being outside in the freezing temps? Ponder on the many memories of snow when you were a child. Story ideas abound!

 How about writing about problems you had because of snow? Maybe your car slid off the road into a ditch. Or you slipped and fell on a snowy step. Perhaps you had a nicely shoveled walk but ended up in bed with a bad back for a week. Or your car broke down on a snowy night in a deserted area. Snowy times can bring troubled times, as well as delight. Write about it!

Write an article about the facets of snow for a children's magazine. Or a fiction story for kids that is a tale of a snowy day. 

When you think there is nothing to write about, think of a simple topic like snow. Write the word on a piece of paper, then draw lines from it with all the thoughts that come to mind from this simple word. 

Make a list of all the words you can think of that might describe snow or have something to do with that cold, white stuff that piles up in our yard and on the streets. Do a freewrite exercise using the word 'snow' as your starter. Write fast, no stopping, about the word for a full ten minutes and see what results. An idea for something to write about perhaps.

Snow--such a simple word but one that can take you many places in your writing world.

Write About Snow

 

We've been dealing with winter weather yesterday and today. Freezing drizzle yesterday, with icy places. Snow and extremely high winds all night, and below zero temps with even lower wind chills. Not as much snow as predicted, in fact, quite light, but the wind blew a lot against garage doors and left other spots dry. The wind also helped get rid of the icy spots. Snow has stopped and now we deal with the extreme cold for a few more days.

When we got up this morning, we found we had no cable tv or internet or cellphone data. Wonderful. It is then that you realize how dependent we are for these kinds of communication. Cox has us up and running again now. Whew!

The snow stretches a great way across our country, much worse to the north of Kansas, but a large swath across the Great Plains and on to the east coast. For a short exercise which you can do today, or save until next week when the holiday tasks have been taken care of, try the following:

A. use the snow scene photo todayto do a free write. Study the photo carefully to see what it inspires, then start writing without stopping for a full 10-15 minutes. You may come up witht he bones of a winter story.

B. Snow lends itself to descriptive words and phrases. See how many you can put in a list.

C. Using some of the words and phrases in your list, try writing a winter poem, featuring snow. The beauty of it, the treacherousness, the difficulty it can cause, the emotions it brings and more. 

If you're like me, you'll be staying inside all day. The small amount of snow is not so bad, but the awful wind chill will keep me in.