In the 2017 movie The Man Who Invented Christmas (based on a book by the same name), we are given a glimpse of Charles Dickens’ writing process as he crafted the holiday classic, A Christmas Carol. For Dickens, the secret was creating the characters and then allow them to tell the story. In the film, the actors and director, Bharat Nalluri, did an outstanding job of bringing those characters to life.

I’m employing a similar strategy for writing The Tree Spirits. I began with a concept based on an established formula for romance stories and created my two main characters, Erik Elias Strand and Grace Parker Gault. My next step was deciding on a location, which in my story is Manitoba, Canada, and then developing an outline inspired by the beautiful landscape and rich culture of that region. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been creating additional main characters in the story and using my location and character profiles to create prompts for AI image generation. It’s a lot like creating a storyboard for a film except in this case I’m sharing my ideas with an AI tool rather than a human illustrator. It’s been a fun but challenging process, trying. to get the AI generator to produce an image that matches what I see in my mind. However, it’s not unlike trying to get another human to see an image that’s in your mind.

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Here’s a glimpse of Manitow Christmas Tree Farm and Inn. Which suite would you choose for a vacation stay?

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The main characters of The Tree Spirits