Discovering the Untamed Imagination

I've said to family and close friends (so please, count yourself into whichever category of familiarity you feel most comfortable with) that the learning curve I've been on as a novelist has been vertical. There is so much to learn about writing, crafting words, structuring a novel, developing three dimensional characters, voice, oh the list goes on. And I'm enjoying this journey very much. I am nothing much more than a learner.

In the mix of learning my craft, I've been examining my creative process. How my mind works, how I connect ideas to characters, situations to words. This too, has been beneficial to my work as a novelist.

Lately, I've felt a holy urging to look more closely at my imagination. My untamed creative imagination. While not entirely un-tread territory, I'm moving further into the depths, asking questions, talking to other creative people (writers, but no only writers), and taking notes. It's been fascinating and unsettling. It would be lovely if I were able to be coherent and sensible as I communicate some of what I'm learning. Alas, I correctly doubt my ability to do so. I will therefore resort to those most sane looking bullet points that make any and all nonsense appear organized and helpful.

• My most wild imagination is laminated to my unanswered questions. I've little doubt this fact is what stops many people from fully embracing their deepest creativity. It is fraught with angst and doubt. It asks questions our minds and experience have no answers for. It invites us to explore the questions with no promise of finding answers. It defies the concrete, the easily understood.
• Creativity is raw emotion brought fully alive though story. This follows my first point. If I'm going to muck around in my unanswered questions, there is little doubt this will lead me to poke at some tender emotions. Loss, fear, religious doubt, anger. It will also bring me face to face with the parts of myself I have long been taught were "wrong" or, at least required to be "held in strong check". Passion, fancy, irony, ego. Nothing is untouchable.
• Allowing my creativity full control of my writing is a moment to moment act of faith. My fear over what will happen if I simply let the story and ideas swirl and mesh as they will without my controlling action seems - frankly - too artsy fartsy to be useful. Isn't novel about structure, plot, time lines (heaven help me with time lines), and making sense?Yes, in finished form it is. But if I try too hard to craft ideas into what I envision as the finished form, I will miss the meat of the story. I will be in danger of contriving rather than creating.
• I believe the story IS the message. My wild creativity doesn't allow me to superimpose a message onto a novel. It demands I go diving into the story for the story's sake. It tells me to trust that meaning and message will be found inside the story. It tells me I am not the one who decides.
• I believe that once the story lands in the hands of the reader, it belongs wholly to the reader. It becomes your novel - and your interpretation of the events and their meaning are correct. In a recent Facebook live chat someone asked Yann Martel, "Who was Richard Parker? (the name of the tiger in Life of Pi) His answer resonates with my understanding of how art is completely transferable from artist to beholder. He said, "Who is Richard Parker? He can be what you want him to be: Pi, a part of Pi, God, Fate--or perhaps just a tiger. You decide, you're the reader. I'm just the writer."
• It is not my job to tell readers what to think. It is not my job to tell readers how to live out their faith. I am not the author of holy writ. I am one of many writers privileged to contribute to the ongoing conversations of culture and human existence. (This is freeing for me. I don't have to be perfect - I only need to be honest)
• The story that emerges from the depths of creativity is unwieldy, difficult. Not necessarily one that has "BESTSELLER" written all over it. I must make peace with the story, not my hope of becoming a bestseller. The wild creative isn't interested in being popular, it is interested in being honest. It is in sharing authentic transparency that the writer finds a multitude of readers who are, after all, fellow travelers on the journey.

I bid you good writing.

Scribble on the walls of life

A writer friend of mine, Patti Hill, once wrote about an incident in her childhood where her imagination took her to places her Mother would rather they didn't. Ah, the logic of childhood. Remember the freedom you had to play, to become someone else, to transform the landscape (a backyard, living room, bed room, wherever) into a wild raging river, or jungle? Wasn't it grand? When did we stop doing that?

Rather - why did we stop doing that?

I know the bible passage too - 1 Corinthians 13:11 - "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." It makes bags of sense, to move out of childhood, into adulthood, leaving childish ways behind us. But where did we get the idea that the application of wild imaginations is childish? Just because it is employed in childhood, doesn’t mean it should be equated with childishness.

As children we used our imaginations to create new worlds – tiny ones, small enough for Barbie and her friends to inhabit, huge ones where all our neighbourhood friends could come and join in. As we imagined and created, we were learning – teaching ourselves the value of things like logical outcomes, fair play, justice, rules, inclusion. We were also fashioning our personal likes and dislikes, giving voice to our true hopes and dreams. We took reality and stretched it to it furthest limits and back again. We were having fun – but we were accomplishing so much more. We were learning how to live in the world by using our imaginations.

As adults, we would do well to remember the imagination of childhood.

I teach seminars based on my non-fiction book, Your Best You. It’s about finding your strengths and using them in all areas of your life. One of my strengths is daydreaming. Another is pretending. I love to daydream. In my daydreams, I’m the star of my own show and nothing happens without my say so. I have lots of fun in my daydreams – but they are more than goofing off. In my daydreams I am working out problems, rehearsing for conversations I’m nervous about, practicing for radio interviews, working out how I feel about a certain topic or issue. I’m having a lovely time, but I’m getting in touch with my real self and exploring a sometimes difficult world from a safe place.

In my pretending and daydreaming, I’m also giving full voice to my creative self. The controls of grown-up rules are less stridently applied. The world of “what if” opens at my feet and I’m free to follow the rabbit trails without fear of “making a mistake” or “getting it wrong”. There is no wrong in the realm of imagination. There is only discovery.

Pretending strengthens my faith too. Anyone who has written a novel can tell you, stories take faith. Writing without a net is the only way to go. Ray Bradbury said it perfectly when he admonished writers to “jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down”. That is the faith of imagination – knowing with all your heart that when you jump off the cliff, you will, at some point, begin to soar. When I am thinking about a story idea, I spend lots of time thinking about what could go wrong for my characters – what challenges they will face. I never bother to think about how I will get them out of trouble. Pretending has taught me that my characters will find their own way out.

The imagination is a wild place – filled with untamed ideas. But it is not childish. It is a place the storyteller feels at home. It is the place where anything can happen – and should. Let’s embrace our forgotten creativity of childhood and bring it into our lives today. Let’s dance in our underwear, sing a song we just made up, giggle at our thoughts, mentally rearrange our landscape, create places only we know how to get to. Let’s give ourselves full, unbridled permission to play, imagine, daydream, pretend, and scribble on the walls of life.