I am well underway with my second book which will be entitled Predicting the Future. Yes, I am really writing a book about predicting the future. And, as with The Meaning of Life, I intend to deliver on the promise. So far I have about 10,000 words in rough draft. When finished it will be about three or four times that long and I hope to get it out as a Kindle book in the Fall. I mention this, not only to plug an upcoming book, but because there is a tie in between writing and predicting the future. Both require a developed imagination.
Where is the future? Movies like Back to the Future would lead one to believe that the future is a place that you can visit and return from, in a souped up flying DeLorean no less. While this premise makes really entertaining movies, it can be a serious problem when predicting the future. To cut to the chase, the future is entirely in your imagination. And, getting better at predicting the future requires that you develop your imagination. If you want to know more about the future, you can read the book when it comes out.
The tie in with the topic of this article is that your imagination plays a large role in writing as well. To cut to the chase your ideas, arguments, characters, plots and even your words come from your imagination. Your muse does not exist in some mystical or occult realm where it feeds ideas and inspiration to you. It resides entirely in your imagination. But, before I get too far ahead of myself. Let me back up and lay a little groundwork.
People often ask writers where their ideas come from. This is a stock question for book interviews. They know the audience, which includes numerous writers and wanna be writers, are dying for an answer. Instead, the writer fumbles around, sputters out a few statements of far less quality than the writing, about which they are being interviewed, and dodges the question. The answer is that they come from their imagination. If the interviewer presses a bit and asks how they get into the writers imagination the answers become a little more standard. You have to read a lot. You have to write a lot. You have to play with ideas.
When you are reading or writing you are creating bits of raw material in your head. They even have a name for it. They call it fabula and fabula is the stuff out of which stories are made. I was watching an interview a few days ago with Donna Tartt the author of The Secret History who said that she always carries a notebook with her to jot down ideas. She said her notebook is like an artists sketch book. That is a great description. Rather than relying on her memory to house her fabula, she writes it down in her notebook. Not a bad idea at all. I personally have dozens of notebooks where I jot down ideas. But, I don't carry one around with me like Donna Tartt. Still, she is one of the most revered writers working today and I am just cranking out a blog page. Maybe there is a connection there. Maybe I should carry around a notebook.
Let us try, for the sake of this discussion, to think of the imagination as a real thing. We do this all the time. We think of intelligence (as measured by IQ), body mass index, and charisma as real things, even though they are not. We might say somebody has the gift of gab and nobody says "Wait! Is that real?" Treating concepts as though they are real is just a convenience, a legal fiction so to speak.
The imagination is a place where you can put ideas, perhaps even picture them, modify them and evaluate the modifications. Imagine a horse. Now make it blue. Next make it fly. Perhaps you want to push it and make it talk. Let's say you can ride this flying horse. Will it talk to you while you are riding it? Does that make you nervous? What if the horse can talk but not speak English? What if it can speak English but is always correcting your grammar and does that horse snorting thing when you use too much slang? See how it works? We have an idea for a story, not a great one, but an idea nonetheless.
How can you improve your imagination? Well, how do you improve anything? You use it. You exercise it. By reading and writing you already exercise your imagination. Take something you've read and start tinkering with it. Stephen King wrote an excellent book called The Stand in which a flu virus that was being worked on in a military lab escaped and started killing everyone. (Hmm... sounds familiar) Anyway, what if the virus, instead of killing people, turned some people red and some people blue. Would the blues and reds go after each other? What if it turned some blue, some red and some yellow. Would coalitions form? We could go on with this or go in different directions or use a different book.
You can develop your imagination doing exercises like this. You can add to your fabula by reading and exercise your imagination by writing. You could take five minutes out each day, take a news story, turn it into something utterly ridiculous, and then see if you can convince yourself that it is still true. I think this is what we call journalism today. Perhaps, I'd better not go down that path. 😎
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