Imagination

An Element of Fiction

No fictional element has been so hailed, so revered, so discussed, and possibly so shrouded in mystery as imagination.

Without it, even your non-fiction will fall flat and wind up as listlessly unreadable prose — not much more than a word statistic.

With it, well nursed and exercised and put to good and honest use, you will become the writer you always aspired to be.

Shedding the sweetest, and possibly most profound light on this wonder is Flannery O’Connor when she speaks for all of us: “Imagination is the light by which we see.”

Denise Levertov, a truly wonderful poet, though unfortunately no longer with us, in turn recognized that, “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” Her poems, still very much alive, are examples of this.

It seems like John Keats could not agree more: “I am sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination.”

For Balise Pascal imagination knows few if any limits: “The imagination disposes all things; it is the imagination that creates beauty, justice and happiness.”

Elizabeth Bowen, obviously no stranger to imagination either, waxes quite lyrical when she sings its praises: “The novelist’s imagination has a power of its own. It does not merely invent, it perceives. It intensifies; therefore, it gives power, extra importance, greater truth, and greater inner reality to what well may be ordinary and everyday things.” (My emphasis).

More pithily, however, from Wallace Stevens (though no less weighty): “The imagination is the only genius.”

As for Joseph Conrad, “Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”

Says John Gardner, who in my book explored fiction more deeply and precisely than just about anyone, “Out of the artist’s imagination, as out of nature’s inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another. The artist composes, writes or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net.”

When it comes to the written word versus moving pictures, I come down on the side of John Fowles: “I do find something distressingly amoral in the very nature of film and TV — possibly because the photographic image denies the spectator virtually all use of his own imaginative powers. Whereas reading requires a constant use of the reader’s imagination.”

My eyes have only recently opened to William Blake, this amazing eighteenth-century genius, who, when it comes to imagination, says it all for me: “The real man, the imagination.”

Hemingway’s practical mind sees it this way: “Imagination is the one thing besides honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more truly he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.”

Still, on the practical side of things, John Fowles adds, “You have to distinguish two kinds of writing: most important is first-draft writing, which to an extraordinary degree is an intuitive thing — you never quite know when you sit down whether it’s going to come or not, and you get all kinds of good ideas from nowhere. They just come between one line and the next.”

Also from a practical standpoint, Jorge Luis Borges urges you to: “Describe nothing you cannot honestly imagine.”

“The intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates,” says Schiller, “and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does the creative mind review and inspect the multitude.”

“Don Quixote,” says Carlos Fuentes, “does not invite us into ‘reality’ but into an act of the imagination where all things are real.”

I’ll let John Gardner have the last word: “Art’s validity can only be tested by an imaginative act on the reader’s part.”

I believe this is his way of saying that your palette, as a writer, is indeed the reader’s imagination.

Okay, so I stole the last word.

© Wolfstuff

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