All artists create. They use various media to create something that wasn’t there before. They bring something new into existence. Painters work with paint, musicians with sound, writers with words, songwriters with both words and sound. Chefs create appetising meals from various ingredients; gardeners position and nurture plants to create a garden, woodworkers can take a tree and turn it into furniture or even a house. Creativity is part of human nature because we are made in the image of the Creator.
My favourite media, of course, is words, and I also occasionally combine them with sound to compose a song. But I love the way that words can be used to create a story, taking us into any era, any place, real or imaginary, and making it live for us.
God uses words to create too! He spoke the whole of creation into existence.
“Let there be light,” he said, and there was. From that first burst of light, scientists claim, the universe is still expanding at the rate of 68 kilometres per second. Words, it seems, can be powerful!
The Creator also touches our hearts and minds with his words, creating within us new and different thoughts, new ideas, inventions and initiatives. We call it inspiration – although I am not suggesting that all inspiration comes from the same source! Sometimes in dreams, or daydreams, even while engrossed in a movie or moved by the beauty of a sunset, his powerful whispers come. He wants more than anything to communicate with the family he made for himself on the earth. He wants to partner with us to create new things.
When I started writing Blood and Roses I had no idea I was writing a novel! I simply started to record a scenario I was “seeing” in my mind’s eye, and the words I was inspired to write about it. The next day I added to it and eventually realised it was a novel. Further down the track it expanded to a trilogy spanning nations and generations – but much of that is yet to come!
I’m presently working on more of Blood and Roses, hoping it will be powerfully inspired. My characters seem real to me and I hope they will to you too. At the moment Nell is bracing herself for an Indian attack on her little town in Massachusetts. I wonder how she will fare…. but if you haven’t read the story so far in Blood and Roses you are not yet acquainted with Nell…
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