How to Get Your Imagination to Light Your Creative Writing Fire

Image via Wikipedia

It doesn’t matter if a writer writes flash fiction, short stories or non-fiction, nothing will get done if the writer does not have a fertile imagination.  For imagination is the source of the writer’s power.

What is imagination?  Who really knows.  There is a lot of speculation flying around from people with degrees and people with no formal education.  It is a topic that everyone has an opinion about, like you and me.  Some people say imagination is the ability to see beyond the present.  Some say imagination restructures form into new shapes.  Some say imagination ask the question, why not?  It all sounds good; but where does the writer fit into all this exotic word play?

For our argument, let’s say imagination allows the writer to come up with subjects he or she can write about.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I would wager that in the writer’s mind, sounds, smells, sights, textures, tastes and memory all combine to form imagination; and what imagination does is to allow the writer to create something new, something that was not there before.  Not something totally new.  What imagination allows the writer to do is to collect all these sounds, smells, sights, textures, tastes and memories that are already at hand and to assemble the familiar into something different.

The writer is merely a junk collector hording junk, throwing away the useless but putting the useful into a big cauldron and melting everything down and then working like a mill worker in the hot fire of imagination to bring forth something usable.

So, if you write flash fiction, short stories or non-fiction don’t fret about writing something new.  You can’t do it.  Just take something old and put your spin on it and with focus and skill and luck you’ll come up with something the reader will appreciate. 

Girls Gone Wild

Click here to download my ebook of flash fiction stories.