by Peter Reynolds Journals are popular in creative classrooms. Those empty pages ready to absorb all the inky words students can conjure up. Alas, the words don’t always flow easily. The wonderful thing about journals is that they do not come with strict rules on what you put into them. Why not try a drawing? A simple doodle. A squiggly line. If the spirit moves you, you can a draw face, or a place, or a teacup or a suitcase. Glance through a magazine and snip out images that intrigue you. Photocopy a snapshot from your family album and glue the image into your journal. Let the art trigger words. I often do that in my own journal. I’ll find myself drawing a line that turns into something. I am often surprised by the odd little scenes that emerge. A huge boat resting on a house. A girl painting the petals of a flower. A dog playing piano in the rain. They are pictures in search of the rest of their stories. Don’t feel you have to find a story for every image. Some odd little scene may be perfectly happy to just be an odd little scene camped out in your journal forever. Months later I may go back through my story-journals (I have stacks of them!) and will see one of these scenes and it doesn’t necessarily trigger a story, but rather a question. "Why is a dog playing a piano? Why is he playing it in the rain?" My mind starts to explain the soggy dog sighting. I like to think that the old expression, "The story writes itself" should be "The story paints itself." Images ARE stories. Stories are paintings. Every word is a color waiting to be splashed on the blank canvas of your journal. Adjectives are vivid colors. Verbs are streaks of paint that add motion to the story. Nouns are dashes of light and dark making forms emerge. Imagine the following sentence: "The purple sky. A star silently hung to sigh. In the purple sky." Close your eyes and imagine it. Use the words to paint an image. I have asked young writers to do this and all their eyes go shut for a few moments. Then I ask them what images the words triggered. I ask them if they can describe the color purple in their skies. It seems that every one has used a different color in their imagined skies. I ask how many of their skies had clouds in them. Half the hands go up. How did they picture clouds when I did not use the word "clouds?" Readers will add "frosting" effortlessly as the words are read and projected in the mind’s cinema. How can that be? Creating images from words that are not even there? THAT is the magic about writing. Your words will not only paint the obvious images but will also drum up the unpredicted and unique colors and shapes tucked in the minds of your readers. . Even YOU will be surprised by your own. Let art inspire your words. Let your words inspire art. Inside and out. Go ahead. Paint yourself a story. Peter Reynolds Founder/President FableVision © 2001 Peter H. Reynolds/FableVision Permission granted to copy for classroom use