It’s Time To Play What If? Again

When the moon is full (last night was the Super Flower Blood Moon total lunar eclipse) and Mercury is in retrograde (until June 2nd), it is time to get creative. (The beautiful evening outside my door doesn’t hurt, either!)

As I was multitasking last evening (as I often am) I started thinking about “What If?” again. I wrote a blog about What If back in 2018 about keeping your What If’s going; writing them down, painting them, growing them. Later that year I wrote another blog called Let “What If” Guide Your Story about letting your mind wander into various “What If “worlds until you found one that appealed to you.

I seem to often talk about letting your creativity take you to new worlds, new thoughts, new possibilities.

Not everyone cares to participate in the speculation of the future. After all, we have enough trouble handling the speculation of today.

But with full moons and retrograding and any other excuse you can make up, this is the time to change your wardrobe and try on something new. Something wild and different. Something stern and conservative.

Something different from the same old you.

I have lost faith in a lot of movies lately; they are the samO samO plots, language, and emptiness. Like many books, paintings, stories, music, guitar solos and such that have come before, we have heard it all.

But now and then I come across a movie that is stark, interesting, and different. Twists I didn’t see coming, emotions that came out of somewhere deep and unpredictable, endings that surprise everyone.

When being creative, don’t you sometimes want to do the same?

Surprise your readers? Paint a scene that was at the edge of what is real? Fire a bowl or vase that is unique all onto itself? Take a picture at an angle that most people never consider?

Sometimes What If’s don’t work quite right. If I What If‘d a realistic park scene with pink trees, unless my genre was pop art or Abstract Expressionism, it wouldn’t work.

But what if I did decide to paint a landscape with pink trees? What if I decided to make water yellow and plants purple? 

If I could actually pull it off, how wonderfully creative that would be! If I used my understanding of color and shading and texture and make everything look real, what difference would the colors make?

That’s what What If is all about.

Taking the familiar and making it do unfamiliar things.

It’s the what-if-you-were-standing-outside-looking-around-and-suddenly-you-see-a-gigantic-spider-climbing-over-the-trees-towards-you sort of moment.

Something you’re not likely to see in this lifetime, yet, if you did ….

I hope you are working on your What If moments.