Pure Imagination

One of my favorite songs is "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. There's something whimsical about the song, embodying the wonder that is using your imagination.

As a writer, my imagination is my greatest asset. I use my imagination to create worlds and characters that did not before exist. And I have a lot of fun doing it.

Sometimes I experience things that make it harder to access my imagination, such as stress or just generally being busy. But inevitably, my imagination wins out.

I grew up wandering through woods and pretending that I was on grand adventures, discovering new worlds and leading expeditions. I didn't need electronics (save the walkie-talkies we used to keep track of each other,) and was content to spend hours outside. Or I would drape a sheet around myself and imagine that I was a grand lady, or a queen, or a general with a great, billowing cape, creating dramatic speeches on the fly.

Time made such pursuits difficult - I no longer had time to just sit and use my imagination. Adulthood is a difficult thing, taking the majority of my time and leaving me aching for sleep when I wasn't 'adulting.'

When I started undergrad, I didn't have the brain power to write anything that was fiction (my preferred genre). Try as I might, I couldn't sit down and focus on writing. However, I had lots of opportunities to stretch my imagination with my involvement in theatre both on and off campus. And though I couldn't formally work on a novel, I wrote many snatches and scenes that were playing in my head during classes.

It wasn't until I'd graduated with my master's degree that I was able to get back into writing in earnest. One of the ways that my stories begin is by dreaming or daydreaming of a specific scene. It will be extremely clear even once the initial scene plays in my head, and I'll play it over and over again until I've seen all of the details. Then, I'll write out the highlights of the scene.

Most of my stories have started this way, though my process after the scene is figured out has changed drastically. I used to trust my imagination to finish a story. When I was younger, that worked fine. I would struggle near the middle because I didn't have a strong idea of how to get to the end, or I didn't know what the end was at all. Many of them still don't have endings, since I wrote myself into plot holes that I couldn't get out of.

After many years of trial and error, I realized that I had to give my imagination some direction. I began taking the time to create a rough outline of the story, writing a paragraph for each chapter to guide the story forward. Though the actual crafting of the scene was left for the actual writing process, having an idea of the major events that needed to happen in every chapter was a game changer for me.

As time went on and life got busy again, I began rediscovering expressions of my imagination. I would daydream about scenes in the car. I would listen to movie and video game soundtracks and create new stories and characters to match them. I'd have whole conversations with myself while out on walks.

Last week on a walk, I found myself fleshing out a whole scene for one of the novels I'm working on. Instead of trying to write it down, I just turned on voice notes and acted out the whole conversation on the fly. It had been years since I'd just let my imagination flow, and it was incredibly liberating.

I try my hardest to instill the need for imagination into my students, but I've found it to be one of the more difficult things to teach. Because students have easy access to screens and the internet, they don't need to just entertain themselves as we did in my generation. They struggle, however, when they're tasked to write a story, or even imagine a new ending to an existing story.

I try to get them to understand that the things that they want to be when they grow up will require some measure of imagination. Content creation, creating video games, and even running a business will need some imagination to make it stand out.

I don't know if I'll be successful in convincing students to put away their screens and just escape into their minds for a while. But I do know that I will take every opportunity that I get to escape into my imagination.