What is imagination? It is the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. It is the ability of the mind to be creative.
open up to imagination, www.studentpulse.com
Can you imagine how boring life would be if not for the imagination? The Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books wouldn’t have entertained me throughout my childhood. My introduction into horror with The Shining wouldn’t have taken place or kept me up for many nights. All of the Agatha Christie books I read so many years ago wouldn’t have been around for me to enjoy time and time again.
The fantastic books I read for entertainment now—The End Time series, My Beautiful Suicide series, Onyx Webb, Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook, Crowns of Silver & Ash, Nightly Visits, etc.—would never have been written. Without imagination, I wouldn’t have been able to write Softly and Tenderly or Dance for Me.
Most of the people who read my articles choose not to comment on them, and that is fine. Below is an unedited comment I received the other day. After you read it, I’m sure you can understand why I chose not to allow it to appear beneath the article. But the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted it to be seen.
Lisa, all of your informational articles are terrible! They’re disrespectful of other cultures. You make silly writing prompts based on practices that have significant cultural and societal meaning (like your “vampire protection” prompt). You also throw in your unneeded opinion on whether these practices are attractive to you personally, and describe them in a bad light. I’ve never seen such improper and heavily opinionated articles on other cultures. Any proper anthropologist would be appalled.
In case you’re curious, “Suffering for Beauty – Neck Rings“ is the article with the silly “vampire protection” writing prompt. Welcome to the world of writing fiction. My writing prompts are intended to spark the imagination of writers, and hopefully, make my articles fun to read. Maybe they will even help one or more writers to come up with their own writing prompts that could be the beginning of a fantastic story.
I can only hope that one of my writing prompts will lead to a great fiction book that will take readers to the outer realms of their imaginations and make them believe things are possible that simply aren’t. It will distract them from their own lives and allow them to share in the lives of the characters they’re reading about. It will place them right in the middle of the action, terror, joy, sadness, whatever is going on in the book they’re reading.
If the above comment was a serious comment and not just spam, I feel sorry for the one who wrote it. Yes, I know. I went and gave my opinion again. But the commenter must live in a bleak world where everything is seen in black and white because imagination, stupid or not, is not allowed.
Imagination is powerful; it lights up our world. With it, things that are impossible become believable. Writers, allow your imagination to soar to the realms of the impossible. Not everyone will appreciate what you write, but your stories make the world a brighter place.
