#WritingtheSenses Challenge - My IG Challenge Starts Tomorrow!

My IG challenge, the 'Writing the Senses Challenge,' starts tomorrow. For the next month, Monday's posts will be introductions to each 7-day section of the challenge. I'll give a description of how I'm going to implement the challenge in my own work. You can follow along with my method or create one of your own using my prompts. Want to know more? Read on!

So What's It All About?

I sometimes read through my writing and wonder where all the dazzling scenery and setting went. I seem to work well enough with dialog and my characters. But when it comes to adding in all the wonderful elements from my world building sessions, it appears I might be all thumbs. In order to counter this and practice including better descriptions of time, place, and circumstances surrounding my characters, I came up with this idea -- writing the senses. It's like using the senses to think about the places and action in the story you're writing. To keep up on Instagram, you can click either the photo above or the photo below to go directly to my Instagram page.

Week 1: Sense Inspiration Boards

Week 1 is all about inspiration and creating inspiration boards, or even mood boards. Here's my plan:

• Think about troublesome or bland scenes in my rough draft. More than one scene is OK. I will just keep track of which photo goes with which scene in a journal or in the sidebar of Scrivener.
• Search out photos that make me think of those sights, sounds, tastes, scents, feelings, and thoughts. I like to use websites like Pexels and Pixabay to grab open source photos I can create photo collages with. Pinterest is also a great place to create inspiration boards, since you can keep adding photos as you find them and it's OK to pin others' photos there. (I don't want to worry about having to create a bibliography for each inspiration board.)
• Compile the photos in some format that's easy to work with, using the day's prompt as your guide. I'll be using Pixlr to create collages like the first photo I shared in today's post.
• Then share the collage or Pinterest board on IG with the hashtag #writingthesenseschallenge. If you participate, be sure to tag me ( @mkrmauthor ) so I won't miss the posts. I can't wait to see who'll participate and what inspires you. Click here to visit my Pinterest page so you can check out the boards I already have posted there.

How to View or Share If You Aren't an IG User

For those not on Instagram, consider writing a blog post, creating a vlog on YouTube, or commenting on each daily post. Just be sure you link back to this blog whether you write a blog post or create a YouTube vlog post, use the hashtag #writingthesenseschallenge and tag me so I can see your responses.

Click here to visit my YouTube channel, which is brand new and still being worked on. (I'm in the process of setting it up to transfer my writing work from my personal YouTube account to my author YouTube account.) For the duration of January, I'll be blogging every day so each person who participates can share here if they wish to do so.

What's an Inspiration Board?

Here's an inspiration board I created for "Over Land & Under Stone". Each of the photos inspired thoughts of the different settings or characters in the story. You can click on the photo to go through my Instagram feed and see other inspiration boards I've created over the last couple of years.

And here's what one of my Pinterest inspiration boards looks like. This board is for one of my main characters. To visit the board, you can just click on the photo.