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Writing Fiction is an Act of Mindfulness
Nontraditional mindfulness, but still mindful.
What IS mindfulness? It is conscious awareness of your inner mindset/headspace/psyche self. It’s reached via conscious awareness of your sensory input and thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
That awareness on the surface — and then the immediate sense of self — puts you in touch with your subconscious mind. It is in your subconscious mind where your beliefs, values, and habits lie.
What has this got to do with writing fiction? For me, the characters, situations, and worlds of fiction that I imagine lie somewhere between my conscious and subconscious mind.
To best engage this requires mindfulness. Being aware of my conscious self opens me to greater awareness of my subconscious self.
I’ve been writing fiction since I was 9 years old. Back then, I employed real people into fictional realities. As I evolved, so did my writing. As such, wholly imagined characters (albeit often based on amalgams of real people I know) came into being.
When I began to write the first scene of The Source Chronicles in 1998, in my mind’s eye I envisioned my sorcerer performing an act of impressive magic — which cost him big. From there, everything else evolved — and now I have 2 finished…
