Planting, cultivating, and harvesting #storyseeds

Many of you know I've been sending out near-daily #storyseeds for several years. They are short images or questions, crafted to spur the reader's imagination and maybe lead to new creative work. Truthfully, I started them as a way to spur my own creativity. It's a challenge coming up with something every day and it's keeping my imagination supple.

#storyseeds started as text only. Sometimes they would be interrogative:

What is that smell?

or

Name your superpower and why.

or

What would you give up to create the change you hunger for?

Other times they might be a teeny-tiny story, or a sentence with the potential to become one.

My garden is full of wild onions, tumbleweeds, and dandelions.

or

You find a note on the mirror. "Don't look behind you."

or

"I can never find shoes in my size," grumbles The Monster, "It makes me think there is an anti-monster bias in the fashion industry."

Lately I've been experimenting with #storyseeds that include images. I'm really enjoying this because it's giving me a multi-layered challenge. Not only do I have to come up with the seed itself, I need to find a way to enhance it with an image. Sometimes the image is integral to the seed as in these:

Other times not as much. While the image supports the seed it isn't the key part. This particular set of #storyseeds were part of a set released over one week, intended to suggest a longer story.

I'm also offering expanded, multi-part #storyseeds over on Patreon. To see those go over to my Patreon page.

I find planting and cultivating #storyseeds has given me a great harvest of ideas. I hope it has for others. Stories rarely emerge fully formed like Athena from Zeus' forehead; they often need to be tended and cared for as they grow. When we pay attention, the potential for a story is everywhere.

As I mentioned in the ideas, images, and story seeds entry in my book, From Audience to Zeal: The ABCs of Finding, Crafting, and Telling a Great Story, "Storyseeds are all around. Ask yourself questions about why the world is as it is. Pick one thing and wonder about it. Maybe your next-door neighbor has a secret. Maybe they are really a minotaur...or used to be a prima ballerina. Maybe they are looking at you and wondering who you really are."

Which leads me to ask: Who are you? What are your #storyseeds? What are you cultivating?

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