Thursday, February 23, 2012
Getting Writing Ideas
Getting Writing Ideas from NewspapersI find all kinds of interesting writing ideas in newspapers. Over the weekend we were in Los Angeles having a reunion with good friends from our UCLA days, and I happened to read an article in the Los Angeles Times about synesthesia. I had never seen this term before but now have done a little further reading about it. Synesthesia is a condition that affects one to four percent of the population where there is a cross link between different senses. In one common form called color synesthesia, numbers or letters are perceived as specific colors. Minds of synesthetes work differently than most people. It isn’t a bad condition and is reported to be neutral or pleasant to those who have it. All I know is after reading about it, I have to have a character with synesthesia in a future novel.
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2 comments:
I know a couple of people with synesthesia. One thing I never thought to ask, but now I'm very curious: do the same colors associate with the same numbers for different people?
As for newspapers: I keep a text document on my desktop to type in ideas I get while reading papers. (Especially things like those minimalist police blotter notes. They often describe people doing weird things, or accusing each other of weird things, but they have no explanation. Lovely for filling in the details yourself.)
From what I've learned so far, for grapheme-color synesthesia different people have different color combinations, although some patterns do emerge, e.g., many see A as red.
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