There’s something funny about the imagination, it can bring your emotions up or crash them within seconds. It can scare you silly or make you laugh until your stomach hurts and your eyes cry. It travels faster than light and slower than a snail. It will haunt you day and night. It can leave in a blink of an interruption.
The funny thing about imagination is you can lose it if you don’t exercise it. It’s not the blank page which is frightening. It’s not writer’s block or writer’s fear. It’s the comatose imagination which stops the words from flowing or the pencil from drawing. Its sleep keeps the paint in the jars and the clay a lump.
The more I focus on one aspect of writing, the less I pay attention to what started me on this journey…fiction. Make believe. Imaginary people and places. Unsolved mysteries and haunted paths. Childhood daydreams and of discovered/undiscovered worlds of my mind.
Never misunderstand me. I love my non-fiction writing. I’m addicted to it. After all, reading is what captured me in the first place. Without Dr. Seuss as a child; Miss Ainsworth in grade four; the weekly Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy fix; and countless other books never denied me, I probably wouldn’t have picked up my pencil, pen, typewriter, keyboard.
However, putting a story together is harder than ever. It’s not overthinking which has been the devil in my past. It’s losing my imagination. No, it’s waking up my imagination. It keeps hitting the snooze button on me…no, that would require it having an alarm clock. I don’t know if my imagination is still at home. Maybe it ran away.
Can imagination do that? Run away? In all these last few years of delving and paying attention to another outlet, did my first love wither from neglect?
I’ve kept pumping the well of creativity, but was I pumping the wrong well?
How does one call imagination home? Patience was never my strongest virtue. I know you’ll say just sit and type whatever comes out. Just sit and let the words flow. Okay, that’s how this came about, but it ain’t working for the imagination. I try and let those words fly and nothing. Okay, maybe not exactly nothing. They’re all jumbled and nonsense. There’s no logic or flow. And I’m not referring to something which edits and rewrites will take care of.
No, I mean there are words and they are definitely, completely fictional in the telling. However, they don’t match. They’re not mixing.
Take a cake mix for example. There are certain ingredients and a recipe to follow. Even those who know what goes into a cake can put these together without a set of rules and end up with a cake. My imagination is tumbling out of control. It has no rhyme or reason; nothing in the well to draw up and grasp. Actually, it’s grasping for life.
So, shoving my internal critic into her box, pushing my fear of embarrassment aside, and plunging way out into left field farther…further?…way past what my comfort wants, I’m grabbing the heal of my imagination and dragging it back where it belongs.
Both of us kicking and screaming and hanging on for dear fiction life.