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by Dr Don Bosco
You know how to use your imagination. It’s a natural talent.
Perhaps, you need a few reminders and my book titled Imagine All This - How To Write Your Own Stories is about helping you with that.
It starts when we’re very young. It’s the same for all of us.
Imagine your childhood.
As a child, you were extremely good at using your imagination. So were your friends. And when you played together, you basically agreed to imagine the same things. You imagined stories.
Children appreciate fairy tales and folk stories in particular, because these are especially suited for imagining. The story elements are often simple yet vivid. Children quickly learn to use their imagination to bring these stories to life. They imagine the characters, the events, the dangers, the solutions, the feelings that run through each character.
A child judges a story not by how complicated it is, not by what it is about, but by how quickly and vividly and satisfyingly it engages her imagination. Also, how it makes her feel.
Whatever you can imagine, you can write.
Like young friends playing together, the job of a writer is to suggest to readers some fascinating things to imagine. So that they can have a good time.
There’s a natural process that powers your imagination.
Spiders create webs, birds create nests. Human beings create stories.
Webs, nests, stories. They’re assembled carefully, according to certain rules of nature, and they’re an essential part of our lives.
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As we listen to a story, as we imagine it, our brains are kept busy on so many levels. And when a story is really powerful, when it triggers the right neurochemicals in our brains, we can become addicted to it.
As we write a story, we create a bundle of information that will activate the different areas in the reader’s brain, basically the parts that handle our awareness, concentration, language, new information, old information, reasoning, relationships, what our senses experience, and more. All at the same time.
Imagine that.
The word “fiction” originally meant something that was created, or thought up. A product of the human imagination. A story. But here’s the interesting thing: once a story is shared, it can feel very real indeed.
Use your imagination in fun and clever ways. Arrange your ideas to create a story experience that will delight your readers.
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Ideas are the tiny building blocks of a story.
We make up stories by assembling many ideas.
An idea is basically something for you to imagine.
When we write a story, we assemble our many ideas over and over in our heads. For a long time. Trying out different combinations and variations. Until it feels right. And then we can write it down or tell it to someone else.
When we write a story, we’re creating a specific sequence of instructions to guide our readers in using their imagination.
We orchestrate the flow of images and feelings that the readers feel.
Sometimes this flow might feel like a powerful flood.
Sometimes a modest gush.
Sometimes just a trickle.
Or even slow drips.
As writers, we must be good at controlling the rhythm of this. Turn it up, turn it down, turn it inside out.
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Enquiries : editor@thebrilliantfoundation.com
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