 A
while ago I wrote an article entitled How
to Imagine that included these ten 'rules' to spur your
imagination:
- Pay attention: Stand
still and look until you really see. The more you see, the richer the
palette you have for your imagination to draw on. If you want to
imagine a monster, look at an insect up real close. If you want to
imagine a perfect world, watch the life emerging after a thunderstorm,
the droplets of rain on leaves in the sun.
- Spend time
with children:
If they're young enough, the imagination has not yet been pounded out
of them by television and games with stupid rules and teachers telling
them to stop daydreaming. Listen and play with them and your
imagination will come back to you, creaking through the rust.
- Remember
your dreams:
Keep pencil and paper beside your bed, and write down what comes to you
just as you fall asleep and wake up, or those rare vivid dreams that
awaken you in the middle of the night. These imaginary thoughts are
more real than real life. They change you. Don't lose them.
- Change
your point of view: Lie down and look up. Imagine if the shoe
were on the other foot.
- Collaborate:
Work with other people, ideally those who have imagination, and who
think very differently from you. Have fun with it. Open
your mind to other possibilities. Strive to produce something
greater than any of you could have come up with alone.
- Transport
yourself: Go
somewhere different, physically or intellectually. Read lots of fiction
and poetry. Visit places you'd never have thought of going. Stay with
the locals. Volunteer. See how the other half lives.
- Improvise:
Explore your mental images. Go with them. Make something out of
nothing. Imagine what you'd do if you needed to do something and didn't
have the tools. Look
inside the windows of your mind. Briefly, slough off your
protective arrogance and be open, submissive, vulnerable.
- Break the
rules.
Or at least change them. Whatever the game, or the business process, or
the routine, change it. Don't always play Texas Hold 'em. Play Countdown
instead. Combine stuff. Make
stuff up.
- Believe,
and make believe: Pessimism
kills imagination. See past what is to what is possible. Create a new
world, fantastically different from the real one.
- Get away
from the media:
Formulaic television and radio and newspapers and magazines get you
thinking that that's the only way to do these things. Video games are
tyrannical, leaving no room at all for imagination. Shun all things
linear. Like top 10 lists.
All well and good, one reader wrote me, but what's the process for
imagining -- how do you put these rules together into a step-by-step
method that will allow you to truly
imagine, quickly, consistently and powerfully?
As I've said before, imagination is not the same as creativity: You can
only 'create' from things that are real, while you can imagine things
that have never been and could never be real. Imagination, unlike
creativity, is not constrained by what is possible.
But at the same time, our brain can only conceive by analogy and metaphor from what
our bodies can perceive, so our imaginations are very much bounded by
the limitations of our senses. That is why imagining a ten-dimensional
universe is so difficult, and why most of the creatures in sci-fi are
so absurdly humanoid. What's worse, we are programmed from an early age
to believe that imagining is a useless, escapist activity (remember
what they did do the daydreamers in your school classes). Imagination
is tolerated in children's play, but we press children to root their imaginings in reality (by virtue of the almost brutal and
constraining 'realism' of dolls, games and other toys we give them). Children are
encouraged and rewarded to direct and restrict their imagination to
imitation -- role-playing the behaviours of 'real', idealized people
(doctors, firemen etc.). Soon, their imaginations begin to atrophy
from lack of exercise and practice. And they turn into us.
So what is the process for exercising and stretching the imagination so
that that capacity returns? How can we regenerate the capacity that
allows some to imagine and then create a geodesic dome, invent a truly
new language, or conceive of applying the light polarization principles
of butterfly wings to anti-counterfeiting techniques for banknotes, the
painting of aircraft, or the invention of ecological eyeshadow?
It's hard to explain what is, to me, an easy and intuitive process, to
someone who might find it difficult and not at all obvious (now I
appreciate the frustration of the instructors who, throughout my life,
have tried and failed to teach me how to swim, to dance, or to
meditate!) But here goes:
Preparation
& Practice Steps (these are things that, if you do
them regularly, will enable you to imagine more easily and powerfully when you want to or need to):
- Continually
think about possible applications of new learnings and discoveries:
Whenever you are learning, reading, or perceiving, allow yourself the
time and space to think about how what you are 'taking in' might be
applied in interesting or important ways. If the character in the novel
you are reading uses an intriguing painting or gardening technique,
think about how this technique might be applied in forensics (could you
write a CSI script around it?) or energy conservation (think:
protective coatings) or teaching (think: the power of demonstration and
visualization), or how it might apply in any other area that you care about.
- Play games
that encourage and teach you how to make stuff up: Instead
of prescriptive games that constrain your imagination, play games like Balderdash
that practice and reward the imagination.
- Open your
senses: By paying attention to what you are really seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or even dreaming, and by
'taking in' all the details, you are creating perceptual memories that
you can later draw on to imagine. Look closely at that blade of grass
and you'll see that it's actually a little green stick-like insect perfectly
camouflaged to protect itself from predators. And describe again how in
that dream last night you managed to fly by inhaling hydrogen into your
lungs and using the same arm and leg movements that allow you to float
on a body of water.
- Study
nature: The natural world around us has evolved
astonishingly complex and effective adaptations to problems, needs and
barriers over millions of years. Because our civilized world is so new,
so focused on narrow, transient, merely-complicated needs, and largely
throw-away, unconcerned with the durability of its products and
solutions and their adaptability, this civilized world is one of
(by comparison) great imaginative poverty. By spending more time in the natural
world and learning from it you will automatically be opening yourself
to more imaginative possibilities. You will learn the art of metaphor, which is a springboard to imagination.
Putting that
Preparation & Practice Into Action (here's the
actual step-by-step when it comes time to actively and purposefully
imagine):
- Motivate
and energize yourself by setting a bold, positive objective or purpose for your
imagining: Direct your imagination to some objective, a
positive purpose that you care about. While it's fun, true imagining
is also work, and you'll do best at it if you have a personal incentive
to persevere at it, and to give it time. While dystopias may sell
better, we are more inclined to spend time thinking about utopias. And
if our imaginative thoughts make us happier, more positive, energized
about possibilities, we will give them more time and energy and do a
better job imagining as a result. And be bold in setting that
objective: You're not going to stretch your imagination if there's a
short and clear line from current state to your objective. Ending world
hunger is not too bold an objective.
- Start with
a blank slate: Disconnect your thinking from the 'real'
world of you and here and now. Our analytical minds start with who,
what, where, when, why and how, and are rooted in the current state of
these things. The imaginative mind must be free from these mental
constraints, especially the inhibiting, grounding 'why' and 'how'. In
your imaginings, the 'who' can be talking crows whose language we have
suddenly learned to decipher, or light creatures who communicate and
move telepathically, or a collective intelligence and awareness that
takes joy and feels sorrow that is not personal yet is felt personally
and profoundly. The 'when' and 'where' can be any time and place, or
out of time in an Eternal Now, or a place where time runs backwards or
makes random walks, or a place where you (whoever 'you' are in your
imagining) are tiny, or huge, or able to perceive with senses that you
can only imagine, or a place where the night sky is full of amazing
objects changing in a continuous panorama. Whatever these things are
that surface when you have made a blank space and time for them, let
them come. Direct them towards your objective, but don't force them to
go there if they don't want to. Make believe.
- Let your mind wander: Several of Frederick
Barthelme's 39
steps for great story-writing can be applied to any
imaginative process. This advice includes:
Make up a story,
screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make
them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune
moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please...Don't let it make too
much sense...Doing odd stuff is good, especially like when you make
characters do it in the story, like when stuff is happening to them and
they just do this unexpected, even inappropriate stuff, and then
somehow it makes a little sense...Don't let too many paragraphs go by
without sensory information, something that can be felt, smelt,
touched, tasted...If you're lucky the idea will keep changing as you
write the story..Don't reject interesting stuff (things for characters
to say and do, things to see, places to be, etc.) because the stuff
doesn't conform to your idea. Change your idea to wrap it around the
stuff...Also, when doing the above, notice the things you notice in
your own "real" life-like what's at the horizon, how the sun is in the
sky, what kind of light's going on, the way the street, ground, grass,
dirt looks, your interest in bushes, what's happening at the edges of
things-buildings and signs and cars, the sounds of stuff going on
around the scene-who's that wheezing? what's that rattle? are those
leaves preparing to rustle? Etc.
I think you can see
how this all applies to any process of imagining. It's all about not
forcing it, about not having it go in straight lines, or leading from
anywhere or to anywhere specific. Great characters take on a life and
logic of their own, and they'll write your story for you. Likewise many
of the ingredients in your imaginings will take you in important, interesting and useful
directions if you just let them. You become a vehicle or channel for them, a means for their
expression. You are complicit in their emergence. It's a subconscious
process, and that
means you need to learn to trust your subconscious -- it has a lot of
accumulated wisdom that your conscious mind can't access. It also means
you need to trust your instincts. Neither your subconscious nor your
intuition are linear processors
like your conscious mind. If you can't free your mind from linearity,
consider using drugs (responsibly), or immerse yourself in warm water,
or light some incense, or lie down and let it happen just before you
sleep or just when you awake, or turn off the lights and visualize, or
exhaust yourself, or go for a long walk without any destination, or lie
on the ground and look up, or do something else to distract your
conscious mind.
- Make serendipitous and joyful connections and combinations: Amazing things happen at intersections.
Create intersections by throwing things together in your mind. If they
don't stick, if there's no intersection there, let them go, and bring
in something else instead. Have fun with it
-- pick things that interest you or which you think are important and
serendipitously draw them together. This is an improvisational process
-- you make it up as you go along, and don't fret about where it goes
and whether it could have been 'better'. Non sequiturs, oxymorons, the juxtaposition of incongruities is funny (it is what makes Finnegan's Wake such a brilliant work of art and imagination).
- Give yourself time and space:
Time limits and deadlines will prevent you from letting go and truly
imagining. Great imaginings may come quickly or sneak up on you much
later, and wake you up in the middle of the night. They will come when
they come.
Well, that's how I imagine anyway. It should
be easy, but for most people it isn't. Let me know if this works for
you, or if you have other processes or steps that help and guide your
imagining.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
