How to Tap Your Imagination to Transform Your Writing

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What separates the average from the great in film and television?

Imagination.

Read on to learn what is imagination and how to increase yours!

What Is Imagination?

If you can define something you are more in control of it. Do you have a definition of Imagination?

When we experience imaginative writing what do we see?

Something that is original, new, and exciting. How so?

Imaginative writing contains ideas, characters, goals, and story complications (and much more) that are inventive and fresh. Imaginative writing has twists, scenes, and solutions to story obstacles, for example, that stun with their ingenuity and cleverness. The hallmark of imaginative writing is the unexpected. One goes, “Wow! That is so clever. What will happen next?!” Imaginative writing captivates and excites us. “A” level writers paint bright colors of imagination on their story canvases. 

The opposite of imaginative writing is stale, cliched, old, dull, boring. Predictable.

Definition of Imagination

Imagination is a creative type of integration.

Imagination is the mental ability to join known things into new and inventive ideas, technology, and art works, etc.

For example, sand and heat are combined to make glass. Iron and coke to make steel. A shoe, knife, and poison are combined to become Rosa Kleb’s secret weapon in From Russia with Love. Star Trek fused known elements such as westerns and space technology to help create wildly imaginative worlds and stories.

Read more about the many elements used to create the iconic Star Trek franchise.  

Study the following literary examples of (in their day) powerful imagination. Each fused known (and often disparate) elements into a new exciting combination:

—James Bond is a ruthless killer and a great lover.

—Hercule Poirot is a French speaking Belgian with a brilliant mind and rampant egoism who focuses his detecting work on psychological clues.

Indiana Jones is an archaeologist/scholar and an adventurer/fighter with a distinctive whip and hat, who is attractive to but not always loving to the ladies.

Star Wars created a new exciting galaxy inhabited with Wookies, a fighting princess, Darth Vader, and especially, a likeable roguish hero and an innocent young man learning to be his highest self.

Scrooge McDuck is a Scottish-American zillionaire skinflint with a crabby personality, high sense of adventure, paranoia about thieves, and a dominating lust for money.

Ayn Rand created hero stories founded on the themes of reason and egoism.

Ibsen created shocking dramas of individualism about key issues of the day.

Shakespeare created larger than life determined giants who speak the most beautiful poetry.

And so on.

And note how incredibly popular and influential are all the above stories of great imagination. Cause and effect.

Actionable Creative Takeaway

Now, I don’t expect you, me, or anyone today to be as creative as great masters of imagination as Carl Barks, Ian Fleming, Ayn Rand, and Henrik Ibsen, for example.

But if you want to create stories that stick and a career that rises, don’t be ordinary!

Don’t settle for the easy and the quick, as many writers do. They splurge it out. They like it. Therefore it must be good. Most often it’s …. well, you get the smell.

When you are creating your characters, conflicts, events, and worlds you must press your self to be new and different. To create the unexpected. Shock and electrify us with your clever integrations of known things into new amalgams. Great storytellers are alchemists. Self-made alchemists!

Your creativity can be developed.

The key to increasing your imagination/creativity is to practise training your mind to integrate – to join – things. For example, practise your thinking to:

1 Analyse the nature/ingredients of things.

2 Look for the meaning of things and how these ideas relate to other things.

3 Look for similarities between things.

4 Look for relationships between things.

5 Look at the differences between things.

6 Practise joining things together in fun or new ways.

7 Think about ironic or opposite things to unite.

8 Ask yourself always: How can this be different and new?

In general, encourage your mind to understand, care about, identify, and create original, fresh, and exciting story elements. This must be your passionate goal and personal obsession. The more you train your mind to do it, the more you will do it in your writing.

Successful creatives don’t settle for anything less!

All great stories express imagination. The key to being a top-level writer, producer, director, novelist, or creative executive is to be imaginative in your storytelling. That is the vital how of storytelling that separates the amateur from the pro.

The exciting reward of being imaginative is not only that you will create new characters, worlds, and art. But you will also live in them.

Want to amplify your story’s Imagination? Hit reply with IMAGINATION.

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