Have you ever built a vision board? If you haven’t, and need a break from the work-a-day of writing and author marketing, vision boards can be fun and useful tools to lend clarity to the vision you have for yourself as an author.

I built my first vision board back in 1999, and kept it on the wall by the bathtub where I could “soak it up” while soaking. By the time I tossed it a few years later, many of the photos had rippled from steam, but I’d pretty much nailed everything on the board. A couple years after that I built a digital board and kept it as my desktop image (shown below). I’m happy to say everything represented on it came to life, too.

I don’t remember how it came up, but a few weeks back some of us got to talking about vision boards, and an editor and I made a plan right then that we each needed to build one, and soon. It will be her first, and my third. Today’s that day and I’m very excited about creating a new vision board, even though I’m not sure how it will look ’til it’s done.

I’ve grabbed a bunch of magazines to look through for visual inspiration, and have my poster board, scissors, markers and glue stick ready for action. It feels almost like being back in school, lots of cutting and pasting and eager anticipation!

What might an author vision board look like?

Your vision board may be about life in general, or it may be specific to your author goals. Some folks build multiple vision boards. If you’re keying in on your writing career, you could include photos of book stores you’d like to sign in, or awards you envision winning. It might be a depiction of best-seller status, or scenes from your newest book. Maybe you’ll include your favorite writing space, or the space you wish you could write in (Villa in Tuscany? Works for me!) Maybe you’ll include a snapshot of a favorite TV show you’d like to be interviewed on, or write in the name of your book-turned-movie on a marquee.

No dream is too big for authors with imagination!

If you’ve created a vision board, we’d love to see yours if you’d like to share it. If we get a few, we’ll do another post to share them with fellow authors, so don’t be shy, send yours! You may even want to create one for your readers and blog about it…

If you’d like more guidance before you give it a go, these articles will help:

• The Reason Vision Boards Work and How to Make One (Huffington Post)

• How to Create an Empowering Vision Board (Jack Canfield)

• What is a Vision Board?

You can also check out plenty of vision board examples on Pinterest! Click the image below to be taken to the search I used for this image and start creating… I hope to see plenty of successful author visions here soon…

July 10, 2015 Update: Took us a couple days, but we finished – my newest one is above right and includes representations for writing, Where Writers Win, visiting a castle (why not?) finding the perfect pool, and of course the right Italian villa…