Writing Exercise: Using Color to Inspire Creative Writing

It's pretty common knowledge that colors have psychology behind them.

"Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions." - Pablo Picasso

Artists and visual designers of all kinds fully understand the effects of color on the mind, and how they bring out emotion in people. Not only to the people viewing the art, but to the artists themselves as they paint. As a writer, you are an artist. Your words create pictures, circumstances, emotion, and vivid imagery (or at least they should). No matter what you are writing, you are always writing for the most very basic of emotions. But printed copy is almost always in black, so how can you, as a writer, use color to your advantage besides using it as a descriptor?

This is where I'd like to explore the concept of writing in color - literally. Getting a box of colored pencils, and writing your work in color BEFORE you print it out. If you prefer to write on computer rather than by hand, just change the color of your text as you write, and once you're finished change it all back to black so it meets the industry standards.

Kinda confused? Let's go through an example of how color can be applied to your writing to inspire a more creative side of your work. 

Let's say we're writing an influential piece on some political stance - saving baby seals from gruesome clubbing genocides perhaps? Sounds good. You're kind of on the fence about the entire concept of clubbing a baby seal and how wrong it is, i.e., you don't really care...(not that anyone could NOT care about that issue, it's a baby seal, FIGHT THE MACHINE). However you still have to write about it because that's what your client wants. Baby freaking seals. So you aren't sure how to get passionate about the poor little things...try writing in color. We want to get our readers to fall in love with baby seals, so we first have to fall in love with baby seals ourselves. 

We will choose pink as our color of choice for this.

 Pink (not red) is the prime color of choice to evoke psychological emotions of love, kind and gentle feelings, and overall passion and genuine appreciation. You might see on a television show that a criminal is housed in a pink cell. There's a reason for that! It's to soothe them, to calm them down. Again colors have a real effect on people. So we open up our word processor, change to a dark background and our text color to pink so we can still read what we're typing, and write our faces off. Staring at pink text as we write instills us with above said emotions, but just for that brief period when we are writing. Our words won't be pink when they're published, but rather during drafting, so we can infuse them with those feelings we're evoking by using color. Now your article about baby seals is no longer monotone and bland because you wrote it in black and white, now it's full of passion, love, and adoration through the purest emotion your heart could muster - all because you wrote it in pink.

Clearly it probably won't be that dramatic, but it is an interesting concept to think about. Seems like a fun writing exercise to me, so give it a try and comment back with any effects writing in color had on you.

• Figure out what basic emotions you are trying to portray through your piece of work.
• Find out which color represents what emotion.
• Pick your color(s) accordingly. 
• Write!
• Doing a love scene? Write it in pink. Introducing a character who is the warm, happy and full of energy? Try orange!

Color psychology is real, and I'm curious to see how this fun exercise could affect my own writing, and yours! :)