It’s fun to create visual images and character profiles that people care about and every time you use your spatial intelligence in this way, you grow more. Not a bad exchange considering you also get a memorable story from the deal too.

Writers add color, textures and shapes to stories when they draw on their spatial intelligence to paint, shape and build a story so that readers’ can see the images as if they appeared on stage. Robyn McMaster over at Art and Mind says it best through O’Keefe’s stories about flowers and Billy Collins’ pictures in his poem, “The Death of a Hat.”

Have you read any spatially appealing story lately that show the topic visually with a bit of flare…? Watch your visually alert readers jump onboard your storyline in ways that increase traffic when you add a few spatially packed tasks for their consideration.

To show spatial writing about the high arctic theme, here’s one scene from my incomplete novel called, Flight of the Raven. “Outside the kitchen window, her team of huskies barely moved. Their heads tucked against the drive of the wind. Their tails turned and curled like snow that swirled and circled around their feet. She stood watching their nocturnal wakefulness, and breathed in coffee aromas, from the warm cup cradled in her hands….”

If you can see my novel scene you have also seen me draw from spatial intelligence. Often hidden or unused by amateur writers, this intelligence allows a writer to project ideas on the back screens of the mind. It’s as though words appear from your spatial muse to paint your story ideas onto a screen or stage so that the reader can better see.

Here are a few spatial tips to rev up your next story for visually inclined readers:

1. Sketch – without using words - one main event in a friendship story which resulted in mutual benefits.
2. Design a backdrop and props for a state-of-the-art office in your home
3. Describe scenes a mentally challenged adult… might see as motivational or inspirational art in your home
4. Identify and detail fun traits you inherited from three relatives and illustrate how they show up in an ordinary day
5. Photograph scenes from a remote cabin and describe your reflections as they jumpstart change in one of your beliefs.

Any other ideas to use more spatial intelligence to paint and shape a good story out there…?

One writer in a class I taught described himself “as riding the wind into a new adventure” in mid-life, after completing a Master degree in computer science. What metaphor in nature describes something you’ve accomplished lately?

Nature holds more fuel for your brain than most people realize. To see how, watch lights and shadows dance on woods or water and then write a sentence to show lights and shadows in your day.

Have you ever tried to write sounds you hear along a wooded path or have you compared nature’s fragrances to aromas that remind you of people or events from your past?

In the last article we wrote stories to activate your linguistic intelligence, now let’s throw another mental resource into the storytelling ring - Nature. If you’ve never thought of the natural world – as power to help you spin a yarn, you’re in for a surprise. Naturalistic intelligence can enrich your writing by activating parts of your brain that keep you young. It’s all part of the multiple intelligences you possess, that could enrich your world.

For the past 18 years, it’s been my privilege to know and exchange ideas about human intelligence, with Dr. Howard Gardner, who, at Harvard University, discovered naturalistic intelligence as one of eight intelligences that define all humans. As with any intelligence, naturalistic smarts grow with use.

Here’s a writing idea to activate your naturalistic intelligence and ratchet up your IQ at the same time. Still wondering what nature has to do with your brain… your life story… or a younger, healthier mind. Compare a person you admire to an animal you value… Or create a conversation between a tree and its nutrients to find a financial solution or answer question you’ve been asking.

Go for a walk, tend a garden, or sit alone beside a brook… and let nature play back its ideas in tender roots for a story that relates to your life. Tell your story to a friend and you’ll grow new dendrite brain cell connectors as a result.

Stories inspire us to write from meaningful experiences. What you may not know, though, is that to write stories, is to develop new dendrite brain cell connections in your linguistic intelligence. Not a bad takeaway when you consider that writing process can also ensure you a younger brain….

What fun or moving story projects itself on the back screen of your mind, that you could write as a way to exercise your brain? I’ll start.

Ten years ago, during a skidoo race to the Igloolik Airport , I almost missed a once-a-week flight to another remote community on the north tip of Baffin Island. It was Saturday, I was 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle and the mercury was about 70 degrees below zero. For all those reasons, I counted myself lucky to get Cecilia, head of the Government Social Work, to roar up to my home in a skidoo, in a last ditch effort to get me there. Yikes! Did I tell you yet about frigid conditions on Baffin Island – up beside Greenland?

Back to my story though… ten minutes before flight time, we hopped onto a small broken skidoo seat, piled my four bags anywhere they’d stick, and Cecilia promised to race back for one bag that refused to stay with us. What a ride! We zoomed through Igloolik’s snow-packed, uneven ditches, out of town to the airport, as if headed down Aspen mountain in a ski race.

Cecilia skidded into gullies over bumps and teetered on the edge of snow banks while I held onto blowing bags, and held my breath. Inuit seem undaunted by the tundra’s’ icy obstacles, and the weaving and tipping of her race machine seemed part of the whole arctic adventure.

Unprepared for a skidoo, or the sub zero temperatures, and even less prepared for the rugged terrain we encountered, I fought to hold bags flying in the wind. Although I could see little of anything that wasn’t white, from behind frozen eyelashes, I caught Cecilia’s smile – a symbol of sheer conquest.

Moments after I spilled into the tiny airport, and tried to thaw ice that seemed to form over my eyeballs, Cecilia burst through the airport door - red-faced and smiling. Hurling a large frozen bag in front of me, she pronounced. “Hope there’s no breakables in this thing… Yer bag flew off the skidoo three times… but I got ‘em here.”

“No problem.” I shot back, “It could have been me flying off that skidoo” And it nearly was.

To write this little skidoo story today, is to relive a keen lesson I learned up past the North Pole. It’s a tale about gratitude for people’s generosity, and about the Canadian Arctic’s hidden wonder. Looking back at this yarn, reminds me a bit of the wonder many brains hide – in uncharted landscapes, now that I think of it.

New dendrite connections keep your brain alive, and writing a story revitalizes these neuron networks. You don’t have to go to the High Arctic to find that story, either. Just jot a few details to share one of your fun or moving moments, and you’ve already started a writing journey that adds youth. So what’s your story?

Look out your window and what’s the first thing you see? A leaf glistening? A wind bent tree? Or do you see an unkempt garbage can with litter nearby?

Have you considered how your attention to beauty can cut you a pathway across a difficult day? Likely as many pictures of beauty exist out there – as there are colors, shapes and textures. Loveliness, an expression of your brain’s aesthetic response to life, takes an awareness on your part, though, before it can transform your day.

You can cut a neural pathway through a difficult area of life, by focusing your attention on snapshots of beauty throughout your day. The brain uses your aesthetic focus as a sort of magnificent oasis in the face of madness from the world swirling around us.

We each possess an innate neurology of beauty, created from genes at birth and further developed and shaped by your perspectives. Your multiple intelligences , for example, link you to beauty in ways that can add well being and motivation for living - even when storm clouds linger in one area or another of your day. How does it work?

Beauty enters your mind as an asset whenever you throw a winning solution to a particular problem that disadvantages you. Let’s say you feel disrespected in a relationship. Beauty can help you make new decisions that add winning benefits for your next meeting with that person. Start by focusing more on one beautiful visual that you value, and your mind will create more serotonin, a chemical that enables you to overwrite mental scripts by rewriting your innate worth and value. Read the amazing story of an Amish community near where I live, rewired for beauty recently to forgive a man who broke into their school and murdered their children.

Their mental rewiring for the beauty of God, of forgiveness, and of life, activated more of your intelligences, and helped this community spot splendor in their surroundings, in spite of intense suffering from loss. That’s also how the mind operates in your favor, and hands you that Eureka solution when you need it most. Beauty can transform the most difficult part of your day and can add new shades of color with a zest for living.

Think of your home as a castle for a moment, and let’s look at how beauty could lift your day and boost your spirit for new solutions in … say … a difficult relationship, or health problem.

First, play inspirational music, and your mind opens to vibrant colors of leaves, and possibly even closer friendships to enjoy. For instance, I’m playing NPR classical station at the moment, and the orchestra moves my brain waves to capture new quiet for thought. If you saw these waves through an EEG you’d see them shift from fast to slower with this music.

Next, come down to my lower floor, and see an oak tree in the backyard, where a black capped, Peregrine falcon sat recently, and watched me work. Visualize the wonder of its 40 inch wingspan. He’s not there today – but I still see his saucy stance whenever I look for beauty out that window.

From my front window you’d see a Japanese Lilac I planted when my daughter and son-in-law married last summer. It’s leaves fell last week but it looks strong and ready to embrace a winter.

Move next to my side window and take in a young neighbor’s Canadian flag - flying alongside an American flag, as a symbol for our friendship and for my Canadian birth.

When I stand in my back window, and see the winding creek, I laugh. For awhile the small bridge kept tipping into the rising waters each time it rained. On one occasion I almost fell in - trying to retrieve the deceptively heavy bridge. Have you noticed beauty at times comes through laughter?

Windows from my home show how to open exquisite views from your castle cottage. The mind becomes a castle when you draw from the beauty of many perspectives. Look out a window for some form of beauty and see splendor in your view.