[Writerpreneur OS] Lesson 0204: Arousing Your Imagination
Writers write and "make up" stories from their imagination daily - both fiction and non-fiction. It's a "what if" factory on automatic...
Arousing Your Imagination
Your imagination should be active, if you intend to write fiction.
If it is not, you should arouse it.
If, when you have to face an unpleasant interview, you automatically imagine what it is going to be like and what you and the other fellow will say and do, that shows imagination.
If, when you look forward to a meeting with someone you like, you forecast just what you will do and say together, that is imagination at work.
If you are quick to adapt yourself to others, to speak and act as they do, you have imagination.
If you are quick to make up a plausible excuse for something you have done, that shows imagination.
If you can thrill to a ghost story or cringe at the thought of touching a corpse, you have imagination.
Does your mouth water when you think of something good to eat? Does a nightmare or a happy dream color your mood throughout the morning after? Consider such questions as these, and you will be able to determine whether your imagination is fully awake and active. If not, practice such routines until it is alive.
If you will look into literary history, you will find that all authors of fiction who were widely popular in their day, all the men who gained fame or fortune or both, had this ready imagination and continually “made up” images, incidents, characters and stories—not just for the market, but to please themselves, or simply because they could not help it.
From Shakespeare to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the popular writer has been a man with a shaping imagination, a visionary person who sees things that are not, who habitually remolds the actual world to his heart’s desire.
If you have such powers and such a habit, rejoice.
If your imagination is feeble, exercise it and develop it by use.
If you have no imagination, perhaps you had better take to writing nonfiction, in which there is more matter, with less art.
Table of Contents
Writerpreneur OS Lessons - Table of Contents
There are just a few true lessons to turn your writing work into a business. And now these lessons have been assembled for your use and review. All so your entrepreneurial approach to making a living from your writing can achieve actuality.
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