Is Frozen Imagination a Thing?

June 29, 2017 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been suffering lately with a condition called frozen shoulder. Basically, it’s when your shoulder muscles become paralyzed and super tight due to not using your arm properly. Mine started back in December with an injury, and the subsequent non-use of my arm led to the frozen shoulder. Contemplating frozen shoulder wandered into thinking about frozen imagination (because my mind wanders the roads less taken).

We often compare our brains to muscles, saying that if we don’t use it, we lose it. Our imaginative muscle is no different—you don’t use it, it gets all atrophied and useless. As a young writer, I had so many ideas, I couldn’t keep up with all of them. They poured out of my brain like Niagara Falls. Now, not so much.

I think I can trace it back to my daughter’s birth. Once I knew I was pregnant, I pushed the stories I had in progress to get the first draft finished before she was born. Then we had the whole infant-daze period, and then I got into editing and revising those drafts. Today, seven years later, I am still revising most of those stories, and have not embarked on a from-scratch novel. I derived my current work in progress from an idea I had many years ago, so even though the novel’s current form is completely new, the ideas and characters are not.

Truth is, I am not feeling very imaginative when it comes to story ideas. New ideas don’t crop up with the frequency they used to, and I find that my thinking within the stories is not as flexible as when I was younger. Finding fresh ways to approach topics and characters is harder for me. Maybe I am simply getting old and set in my ways—or maybe I have not exercised my imagination for so long that it’s flabby and weak.

My frozen shoulder needs physical therapy to get back to working order. It’s hard, and it hurts like heck as I stretch those muscles again. But that’s the only way to get it back—to push the limits and ask the shoulder to work again. Perhaps my frozen imagination needs some sort of therapy as well. I need to ask it to work again, and push past the comfort zones.

Maybe then my frozen imagination will thaw and my brain will feel more nimble.

So how about it, fellow writers? Any good tips for exercising my imagination muscle?

Inspiration: The Paths Taken

February 23, 2012 By 11 Comments

Two roads diverged in a wood…
–Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken


I find paths winding through the wood irresistible. Not that I go charging down every one I see on a whim, mind you, but the image of that path stays with me for a long time. They call to me with the voice of the past, luring me away from the loud, crowded, connected present to the quiet, expansive solitude of a time long gone.

Paths like this appeal to my sense of adventure. (My husband is now snorting water out his nose as he reads this, because I am, shall we say, less than adventurous in my travels.) But the adventure of wooded paths is one of the imagination, not just geography. As my feet follow the pathway, I wonder about those who have gone before. Who were they? Why were they here? What were their lives like? What trials did they face? What triumphs did they celebrate? What were their stories?

Paths like this inspire me; they fire my imagination. They bring me a welcome release from the hectic pace of the normal world. They allow me to breathe, to be quiet, to think—to feel. Where they lead me to physically is almost irrelevant. But most times, I get the added gift of vistas like these: 

How can I pass up a path when it leads to a reward like that? And how can I as a writer help but get new ideas when a path leads to a house like this:

What’s it like to live in a house only accessible via water? It must cut down on unwanted visitors, that’s for certain!

The other day I drove past a wooded area. At one point two pillars stood. Once a gate—I picture wrought iron—had stood between them, but now one pillar lay half-toppled and a large branch blocked the way between them. Beyond the pillars stretched a path between the trees. Yellow and orange leaves lay thick on it, covering it and reclaiming it for the woods that surrounded it.

It called to me, but I could not follow it…that day.

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

–Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

My Writing Process, Part 1

July 14, 2009 By 3 Comments

Every writer has a writing process. Good writers take the time to figure out the process that works best for them—the one that gives them maximum creativity, maximum writing time, and maximum output. When you find that process, you are lucky. When your process breaks down, it is catastrophic.

My own process grew organically, and from a young age. I loved to write all through grade school, and when I got to high school, I found a new best friend—Donna Hanson. One of the things that drew us together was a shared passion for writing. From the age of 14 on, we churned through multiple novels, authoring some of the worst writing ever penned.

But we learned. Together, we explored what it took to tell a good story: plot, pacing, character development, and all the rest. We learned how to create new worlds, how to craft interesting, believable characters, and how to keep readers turning the pages. (One of our friends, who is not a writer, once graced us with this gem: “The way to create a page-turner is to never end a sentence at the bottom of a page.”)

As we matured, Donna and I continued our collaboration, and we worked out the kinks. She and I both hammered out the ideas, the plot, and she would “supervise” some of the main characters, and I would take the others, thus building in differing points of view. Donna rarely did the actual writing, which allowed us to have a single voice throughout the work. She did the proofreading, and (in the early days, when I wrote longhand because I had no computer), she did the typing, too. And always, she was there when I had writer’s block. I could pick up the phone and we would talk for hours until the logjam was broken, the problem solved. In later technological times, it was emails 3 or more times a day, whenever a question arose.

Having two brains is always a plus, but the advantage was also in the synergy of two people who shared a passion for the craft. Writing can be a lonely undertaking, and having someone eager to plunge into the imagination with you at a moment’s notice can be a godsend. I still recall some of her more memorable quotes:

“Wouldn’t you be afraid of you, if you were you?!” (Enthusiastically exploring a character’s fear of herself, and mangling the pronouns while doing so.)

“Ker, what planet are we on?” (Brainstorming a science fiction book that took place on several planets.)

And the ever-present, “Umm, Ker…” which always preceded her pointing out something incredibly ridiculous that I had written.

So, my process grew intertwined with Donna, and hers with me. The juices flowed, the writing came, and everything ran with a humming smoothness that became second nature—it became like breathing. Writing equaled Donna, and it worked wonderfully.

Then she died.

Are kids losing their imaginations?

April 1, 2009 By 2 Comments

I was reading recently about a group of people who are literate, but do not read for fun. These people believe that people who read for fun are anti-social beings who do not know “how to live.” It struck me that this sentiment was somewhat akin to the phenomenon I have heard about in lower income areas, where being literate and educated is not considered “cool,” and is often seen as “selling out.” It was also noted that these same demographics often have hundreds of DVDs and video games in their house, but few books. And it got me wondering about imagination.

 

Kids are inherently imaginative and creative, but in order for it to survive, it needs nurturing. In our culture today, I believe we are losing that creative nurturing. From very early ages, we plop our children down in front of the TV as an electronic babysitter, and they passively ingest the information fed to them from the screen. Their minds grow as flabby and lazy as their bodies. They have no reason to create anything—the characters are there in the flesh, to be seen and heard, and there are no blanks to fill in or leaps of intuition to make. No need to imagine anything. The same holds true for video games. Putting aside the whole issue of whether the games are too violent, the games are becoming so realistic that there is no need for imagination there, either. Strategy, yes, imagination, no. Because there is usually only one specific pathway to the next level, there is no creative problem-solving—just trial and error until they hit upon the answer the game-makers wanted.

 

Which brings me to books. Books are the epitome of imagination. Every reader will picture the characters looking and sounding different. Some readers will get the more subtle aspects of the book, some will not. Some will make intuitive leaps, some will not. But the entire world is in their heads. And, yes, it is hard work. The reader has to do all this work themselves, involve themselves in the world on the page. They cannot sit mindlessly stuffing their faces while mesmerized by pictures on a screen. They must build a fantasy world, taking part in every aspect of it. They must actively engage it, struggle with it, triumph over it. In becoming part of the adventure, the reader shares the tragedies and triumphs of the protagonists, and in the end, has “lived” much more thoroughly than the person watching a movie. The movie viewer has observed another world, while the reader has experienced it.

 

Kids today are in danger of losing their imaginations. Electronic gadgets passively feed them everything they want. School curricula are often rigid, discouraging students who think “outside the box.” There has been a great deal of talk over the years about the decline of the USA in scientific innovation on an international level. Innovation of any kind requires imagination. Exercise our kids’ imaginations. Give them a book.

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