Story Food

Stories, like all living things, start out small. One tiny seed of an idea can grow and branch and lead to more ideas, until you've got enough story for a ten book series.

But this won't happen all by itself. Stories, like all living things, need food.

How do you feed stories? What gives you that feeling that there's something growing inside you, something that has to be told.

For me, experiencing great stories always helps my own stories to grow. When I go too long without reading, my stories tend to get stunted. I'm trying to keep up a healthy diet of books, with the occasional movie or play for dessert.

I also like to participate in other creative activities. Music, woodworking, and the odd sewing project give me a change of pace and help pass the time while I wait for new ideas to sprout.

Travel is great story food for me. Seeing new places and meeting new people always sparks new growth in my forest of story ideas.

And now my favorite kind of story food, NON-fiction. I love to watch documentary films, listen to NPR, read books about nature, science, art, history, medicine, ANYTHING! My latest find is DK's Eyewitness Books series that my eight-year-old brings home from the school library. Full of pictures and interesting little facts, they're a story feast! Oh, uh, was I writing a blog post? Sorry, I started looking through the Eyewitness book instead.

So how do you feed your stories?