Envisioning The Coming Year

I don’t know about you guys, but the holidays are heating up for us around here. Carols are playing, Salvation Army bells are ringing, kids are getting wound up and goofy. Yep, Christmas is just around the corner…

Mary and I would love to tell you all to just take a month off all your promotional and marketing duties, as well as shopping and cleaning and cooking and parenting and just recharge. But of course, we can’t in good conscience.

Plus your families would kill us.

What we can do, however, is share an idea for an activity that you may find spiritually and creatively uplifting, which may in turn help you recharge. An added bonus If you have kids, they can play along.

Here at SVP we try to give you lots of tools to help promote your books, get comfortable with the amount of promotion you can reasonably do, and gently stretch your goals to encompass the life you want to inhabit. A lot of this information is outward focused to meet the challenges of a promoting author. Today however, we’re going to talk about a different kind of activity—a highly inward-facing one: collages and vision boards.

Now before you roll your eyes and think you left all that back in grade school, let me gently point out that collages and vision boards are a highly effective tool in helping focus your creative energies—either in a personal direction or in a project-related one.

There are a couple of different ways to approach a vision board. You can create one that focuses on:

Personal growth aspirations for the coming year
Professional goals
Creative goals
Spiritual areas you’d like to work on.
Qualities you’d like to more fully embrace or invite into your life
Whatever whispers to you, that’s what you should use for the focus of the board.

But perhaps you’re more comfortable working on something to do with your work-in-progress, and that’s fine, too. Some story collages capture the overall mood and feel of the book.

They can also be representative of certain scenes or parts of the book, maybe even parts you're having a hard time nailing down. When you work on a collage, you let your subconscious take over and then, watch out!

You will likely find yourself drawn to elements that have no real place in your life or your story, but will instead invoke some hidden theme or motif. Embrace that.

Supplies Needed:

~ Assortment of magazines and old books
~ poster board or foam core board or even just a big thick piece of construction paper
~ glue sticks, double stick tape, scissors, stamps, anything that your imagination grabs hold of
~ A couple of free hours (probably the hardest to locate!)

But don't just take our word on the benefits of collages. No lesser authority than Carl Jung has claimed that our best work originates in play.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, which belongs also to the child, and as such it appears to be inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. – Carl Jung

We’d LOVE to see some of the vision boards and collages you create! If you get motivated over the next few weeks (even after the holidays) please do send us a jpeg of your collage/vision board and we’ll feature them here on the blog. (We can absolutely share them anonymously!) And while sharing your project is definitely not required, we might even have a prize drawing for all of those who participate. If you'd like to share, send your jpeg to us here at Shrinking Violets, and we'll do the rest.

So open up your mind and let your imagination GO . . .