Destination: Imagination (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Many decades ago, schools, especially the primary ones, were still run on the lines of stiff backs, wooden desks, inkwells, the cane and rote learning. I hated school with a passion. The bright spot in each week for me was the ‘composition’ writing. There was probably a range of subjects, but I only remember two.
Write about:
1) one of the following your holidays/weekend/birthday
2) a day in the life of a (subject was different each time) i.e. tin-can/penny/sock etc
Number 1 was okaaay, but really what does one write about? They didn’t approve of lying. All our days/holidays/birthdays were pretty much the same back then, our experiences the same as each other; we all had a fortnight near the coast, or in the country. In tents or caravans maybe if you were lucky in pre-fab shacks. It usually rained. We all went to each other’s parties and the games we played, the food we ate were the same (there was still rationing on).
But that second one, well there were possibilities in that title. One could write a straightforward piece of reporting, find out the facts and write about them. For moi? Never. Emotions, thoughts, wild adventures all beckoned. A tin-can from birth to death? Well, a free imagination could play with that. A penny? Think of the hands a coin could touch in a day, the lives it could transform. Magic. In a poor scholastic record these compositions gained me some marks that were sorely needed. The only lesson when I wasn’t cuffed around the head and told to concentrate, to stop day dreaming. I no longer had these exercises when moving on through the education system but I never forgot them.
As I travelled the world, I often had hours when I sat and waited, at stations, airports, bus shelters. Long hours on trains and boats, weeks working at some dead end job, moments of stillness. Quiet hours in lodging rooms, motels and tent. I would fill them with ‘ A day in the life. . .’ daydreams. They were fun, exciting, bizarre and companionable; some of the plot lines were amazing:)
Consider how often an author uses this concept. Building complex and complicated plot lines and characters from tidbits. A tail end of a conversation, an interesting face spotted in a shop. A beautiful or misshapen pebble/rock picked up on a walk along a beach. The whispering of trees in the night, the stillness of a bird watching – what? A song, a painting, a tennis ball soaring across an audience’s heads. Idle moments waiting, still moments resting, unexpected moments in the middle of a rush. Imagination flits, soars, and crash lands in our brain all the time. ‘A day in the life of. . .’ moments can feed short stories, novels, series, there is no end. They can be stretched, elongated, added to. Many of them can be added together as a raft.
Consider how often an author uses this concept-building complex, complicated plot lines and characters from tidbits. wp.me/p26xCM-6FO
— The Indie Exchange (@IndieExchange) May 22, 2013
Sometimes it is difficult to trace back where a seed of an idea has come from. Why have we sent our characters in a particular direction. Read a magazine, watch the news and, in the middle of it all, that happy flight of imagination can take the story and twist it, mash it, recreate it, change it beyond recognition, yet the seed of the story existed, in another form. Our minds are shape shifter magicians of extraordinary ability. Did some enlightened educationalists at my primary school hope that an imagination, let free to fly, would be a gift that lasted throughout the decades.
I hope so.
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