Take your imagination seriously

[Daniel]

Roz Morris has one of the few writing blogs I visit on a regular basis. She posted an article this week on "taking your imagination seriously," a concept she got from an interview with Brian Eno about what makes creative people special.

Here's the article (very short-only about 400 words)
Writers’ manifesto for 2017 – take your imagination seriously

Morris quotes Eno as saying, "It’s not just having ideas, but being prepared to push them through and try to make them work." I think that one sentence sums up why I enjoyed writing my first novel and why I've enjoyed writing since then. Many people start book projects and lose interest somewhere along the way. I suspect that's more a failure of faith (in one's self) than a failure of imagination. Having ideas is only the first step. You have to be interested in where your imagination takes you more than how it gets you started.

I understand a little better now why some writing coaches suggest that you start your story at the end. Even if you don't literally write the end of the story first, that approach might help some writers keep their eye on the prize, which is a completed manuscript. Starting at the end doesn't work for everyone, of course. Eno himself said that part of the creative spirit is to be interested in where an idea will take you, which is more of a "pantsery" way of looking at things.

I guess it all depends upon how you like to assemble a story, but regardless of your writing process, I think it helps to take your imagination seriously. Imagination is the tool that puts wonder in the creative process and that makes everything you produce uniquely yours.

[Pru Freda]

My father was a keen gardener and alongside vegetables grew roses, sweet peas, and dahlias. He had a particular soft spot for tulips. One spring, when I would have been about five years old, a tall, large flowered specimen with bright red and yellow petals grew by the side of the coal shed, easily visible from the living room window. I looked at it for days until the morning the petals fell and I saw them lying on the soil and the lawn.
I went outside and gathered them together. In my imagination they were the spirit of the tulip. I threw them into the air, thinking as I did so that I was casting their soul to the four winds, and watched them flutter down like butterflies. Then (because I knew no botany) I gathered them up a second time and planted them, burying them in the soil and muttering a childish prayer that they would grow again.

My imagination is still as ephemeral as those petals and I go chasing after it, hither and yon, loving those moments when it starts to tell a coherent and complete story. I take an odd delight that, through the medium of my stories, it is my imagination that will live on after I'm gone.

[Daniel]

Jan 8, 2017 11:16:32 GMT -5 Pru Freda said:

My father was a keen gardener and alongside vegetables grew roses, sweet peas, and dahlias. He had a particular soft spot for tulips. One spring, when I would have been about five years old, a tall, large flowered specimen with bright red and yellow petals grew by the side of the coal shed, easily visible from the living room window. I looked at it for days until the morning the petals fell and I saw them lying on the soil and the lawn.
I went outside and gathered them together. In my imagination they were the spirit of the tulip. I threw them into the air, thinking as I did so that I was casting their soul to the four winds, and watched them flutter down like butterflies. Then (because I knew no botany) I gathered them up a second time and planted them, burying them in the soil and muttering a childish prayer that they would grow again.

My imagination is still as ephemeral as those petals and I go chasing after it, hither and yon, loving those moments when it starts to tell a coherent and complete story. I take an odd delight that, through the medium of my stories, it is my imagination that will live on after I'm gone.

What a wonderful anecdote. Kind of chokes me up.

I take an odd delight that, through the medium of my stories, it is my imagination that will live on after I'm gone.

I was talking with my wife about this very thing a couple of days ago. I should frame your eloquent summation and hang it on my wall.