by Carol Natoli

Created on: May 26, 2009   Last Updated: September 08, 2011

Using your back yard has its many perks, especially for inspiring the writer in you. In your "backyard", or on your deck, you can sit and relax in the privacy of your home. Notice things around you, as you let your mind wander and as you daydream, perhaps initially thinking about nothing. Notice the birds fly hear the locust. As you look as the squirrels climb the trees, notice and wonder how they climb and jump without falling. You are amidst your very own oasis, your own private park! Maybe that in itself is a topic for a story!

Look as the colors of things around you and the smells of nature; not just the flowers, but perhaps the smell of rain that had fallen in the early morning. If you had been a camper , in your early years, it is quite probable that you will think back towards your memories of camping, and thus, a story could be born! It is a play that allows you to reflect and daydream!

Perhaps sitting in your yard will bring you back to a place when you were a child. Did you have a swing in your yard? If you did, did you try so hard to pump that swing and couldn't make it go higher? Did you have ease using a swing and try to touch the longest branch on that apple tree and fall? May you played outside and made mud pies, pretending you were baking, with sand as the crumbs on top of your coffee cake! Did backyard shows fill your summers, with sheets on your mother's clothesline used as the curtain of your stage? How much was the admission fee? If it was in the 1960's, one would try to remember if a nickel was the going price!

Outdoors, thinking about childhood, might enable one to recollect the money that was made from lemonade stands, at a time when children could be left alone outside. Maybe that is where you met your first friend or learned how to work to buy something you wanted. Perhaps you learned a lesson about saving money? Do you think your backyard has been the platform for magazine articles, a children's book, or a memoir?

Backyards provide a sanctuary for tranquility, solitude, and inspiration for the writer. While it can be like an extra room for family gatherings, it also serves a purpose for after-dinner conversations, without looking at the clock, and perhaps those talks are inspirational in itself. This place also is one's domain within their own secret garden, where ideas are unlocked as flowers bloom, and our minds open up to all possibilities. It is a quiet area at home, where one can think without interference, or drift away to a time in life, when schedules did not clutter the mind!

Backyards are havens for those who have writers' block or who just need a little push to get those ideas on paper! It is, the place to dream, look back, plan, and turn one's thoughts into, perhaps the greatest novel of all time!

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