Lights Out! Imagination On!

 By Thomas Kies

Isn’t that when your imagination runs wild?  In the dark?

On New Year’s Eve my wife and I met friends at one of our favorite restaurants on the mainland.  We had a relatively late seating for eight o’clock, but after dinner we thought we’d walk over to the harbor where we could watch the holiday fireworks.  

The stage was set for that evening when fog rolled in from the oceanside and then a steady drizzle fell.  Before we headed over the bridge, we’d heard the fireworks had been canceled due to the incoming inclement weather. 

Not to be deterred, we all convened at a cozy table in the dining room and started our evening with a round of drinks.  Taking our time, we enjoyed conversation, listened to the specials, and gave our server our orders.  Knowing that the dark gloom was just outside, it made the dining area even more congenial.

Until the lights went out. 

Where we live, momentary lapses in power happen on a relatively regular occurrence.  Usually these are only long enough to screw up the clocks and force your computers to reboot.  

This wasn’t one of those times. 

We spent the next twenty minutes speculating what may have caused the outage and how extensive it was. Patrons and servers were consulting phones, searching diligently for information.  

“Was it the wind?”

“There was an accident behind the hospital.”

“A transformer blew downtown.”

“Must be more rolling blackouts.”

The most ominous of the theories was, “Someone shot out the grid.”

Our waitress came out of the kitchen into our dimly lit dining area and announced that they simply couldn’t continue with service under the circumstances.  Our friends decided to stay for another drink but Cindy and I bolted, hoping there was power on our island and I could get to our favorite dive for a pizza before they closed.

The rain was falling, the streets were eerily dark, the stoplights were out, and traffic was building as New Year’s Eve celebrants realized the evening was over and it was time to go home. As we crossed the bridge, aware that there were no lights behind us and only darkness ahead of us on the island, we realized there would be no pizza, no Chinese, no take-out at all.  We’d be foraging for food once we got to the house.

But as I drove, one thought kept intruding upon my thoughts of a cold holiday dinner.  Someone must have shot out the grid.

Such is the mind of a mystery writer…or a paranoid conspiracy theorist.  That’s what we do. We wonder what if? We wonder what if someone actually attacked our power supply like they did on December 3 in Moore County, North Carolina, not far from us, where someone with a rifle shot out two substations and knocked out electricity for 40,000 people for four days? 

I wonder how I can incorporate that into my new book????

The power of imagination.  It’s what keeps writers in front of their laptops and pumping out the prose.

So, my wife finished a salad she found in the refrigerator, and I made peanut and butter sandwiches, and we ate by candlelight in our kitchen.  We listened to fireworks as they went off in our neighborhood sounding like gunshots.  That didn’t quell my nervous imagination.

I found a live feed on my phone beaming images of fireworks displays from around the world that I pulled up at our table. My wife proclaimed that, “Boring.”

Then I found a movie and began to watch it, still chewing on my PJ&J sandwich.  Just before she left to go upstairs to read by candlelight, she told me, “I’m not watching a movie on your damned phone.”

The movie?  War of the Worlds.

Ah…new paranoid thought.  Was the darkness on New Year’s Eve caused by aliens?

In actuality, it was an insulator here on the island that had gone bad.  The salt air wreaks havoc on all manner of things.  We never did get our power back until five in the morning. 

I’m still not convinced it wasn’t aliens.  Such is the power of imagination. 

Walking for mind and soul

Facebook is very useful for the random links it shares, sometimes posted by friends and other times by sponsoring companies. Facebook is also good at tracking what I like or might want, so I would never get a link to Rebel Media, for example. (if I did, it would be killed as fast I could click delete.)

Recently The New Yorker posted a link to an article about the connection between walking, thinking, and writing. I apologize if this link is behind a paywall, but the gist is that walking stimulates creativity and novel thinking by allowing the mind to drift in and out between the real world and our own inner world, and furthermore, that walking in nature does this better than walking in the city.

Other studies have confirmed the benefits to both physical and mental health of walking in nature, this at a time when more and more people live in clamorous cities and green spaces are fewer and fewer (because there are no property taxes to be collected on parks, for one thing). My city of Ottawa has an official city planning policy of "intensification", which means building more tall condos and multi-unit dwellings on lots where there used to be smaller homes on lots with lovely mature trees and gardens. But I digress.

The main interest for me in this article, and in similar ones, is that walking in nature stimulates creative thought. Scientifically, this is apparently because blood flow to the brain increases when we move and because our body, including our brain, tends to move in sync with our surroundings. Hence if we are listening to hard rock music or walking down a busy street, our body revs up. While this can be energizing and enjoyable at the right time, it is not conducive to creative thought, which needs a drifting openness of mind to allow novel, random thoughts to enter.

Like most authors, I suspect, I have always known this. Because I have dogs, I take long walks every day and that's when I do my best story development. If I have a plot snag or a character puzzle, I often take a walk just to "clear my head". I find the act of walking is a non-intrusive backdrop with just enough stimulation to keep me thinking. Have you ever tried to sit in a chair doing absolutely nothing except think? Chances are you start to doodle or jot down notes or pace from the kitchen to the office.

The walks in nature are by far the best. Distractions are fewer, you don't have to watch for street lights or dodge cars or pedestrians, you can look for occasional inspiration at the rustling trees and glistening lake. Or you can stay almost entirely inside your own head, imagining your story. Taking this nature walk idea one step further, another scientific benefit is that walking on uneven, unpredictable terrain like a hiking trail engages more parts of the brain than walking in a straight line along a flat path. This has limits for creativity, I find, because if you have to pay attention not to trip over a root or rock, you can't lose yourself as completely in your imagination, but in moderation, it can help get the juices going.

One worrisome thing I notice on my walks is how few people are actually enjoying just being in nature. Almost everyone is listening to something on their earbuds (audio books, music?). Since I find that disruptive to my thoughts, I never do, but I'd like to know if it helps or hinders "mind drift". Or if the walkers are not attached to earbuds, they have their nose in their phones, oblivious to everything around them. This transports them to another world, for sure, but not one of their own imagination. I am afraid that imagination and mind drift are becoming a lost art.

And what a loss that would be to our creative future.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

When we were children, my sister and I lived off and on with our grandparents. They resided in a cottage in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York on one of the smaller lakes. During the summer time, the cottages and restaurants were full of renters and second home owners. In the off-season, however, we were one of the few year-round residents. In winter, it was downright desolate.

When it was so quiet and lonely, that’s when my sister, Bonnie, and I would make up adventures and live them out among the empty cottages and dirt roads. Living on a lake made the adventures more real. The blowing snow, the fog lifting from the lake’s dark surface, old Native American tales—the mysteries were dark and spooky. Perfect for adventurous children.

On top of that, there was a Boy Scout camp on that lake, about a mile from us. During the winter, nobody was there and it was a great place to explore and look for pirate booty or where the bodies were buried

My sister, God bless her, was two years younger than me and she was really a good sport at living in my imagination. Granted, there were times when she’d balk and refuse to go on my adventures—until I promised to give her wheelbarrow rides when we got back to my grandparent’s house.

Then, as I got older, to make money, after school and on weekends, I worked on dairy farms and vineyards in the area. A lot of that labor is solo and repetitive so to keep from going stark raving mad, I made up stories in my head. They were always thrilling adventures, where I was always the hero.

Gee Tom, that’s great, but when did you want to become a writer?

I’m getting to that part.

In addition to making stuff up, I was a voracious reader. My grandfather had a huge collection of Louis L’Amour westerns and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series. He also had a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories.

When the new James Bond novel would come out, I’d pay my sixty cents to buy the paperback version down at the local pharmacy. Then I got addicted to John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee mystery/thriller series.

         Get to the point, when did you know you wanted to be a writer?

It was when my grandparents let me use their typewriter. I was only eleven or twelve at the time, but I thrilled to sound of the keys as they tapped out the stories in my head and put them on a sheet of paper. The tales I wrote were of murders and kidnappings and general skullduggery.

Whenever I wrote a passage that contained the word “blood”, I switched the typewriter ribbon from black to red.

Oh, scary.

My grandparents were my biggest fans. My Uncle Hub (Emory Herbert Young) was also a story teller and would read my adventures and encouraged me to keep writing.

But real life got in the way. Dating girls, college, marriage and children of my own. I never stopped writing, but I was working for newspapers and magazines at the time. It wasn’t until my children were grown and I changed careers, that I became serious about living in my imagination again.

I didn’t have to dig very deep to tap into that childhood imagination that I enjoyed for so much of my youth.

According to Joanne Friedman, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, “The ability to continue to create fantasy out of reality continues into adulthood. Whether we indulge it or not is a personality differences matter. Adult don’t “squash” creativity in children. They may limit its expression, however, by not listening and by telling a child he needs to stop expressing it. It still exists internally and comes out when adults aren’t around. I know my parents, not really the most attentive listeners to my shy little voice, had no clue I thought I could fly (until probably the fourth or fifth grade) and was spending time jumping off the picnic table not to hone my jumping skills but because I was flying, in my own mind, across the yard. So how loudly a child expresses the fantasies also plays a part. Creativity would not exist at all in the adult world were it not for the fact that we all still have that little voice in our heads that remembers our early explorations and thrives on the memories.”

So fellow writers, let’s keep makin’ stuff up and writin’ it down.

Finding my muse

Aline's post about chattering monkeys and accessing our subconscious connected with me on so many levels. I've always believed writing - the creative process of it - was part magic, and I never wanted to analyze it too closely for fear of losing that magic. I love that my mind goes to unexpected places, and that ideas pop randomly into it while I'm in the middle of a scene. It's one of the reasons I am primarily a "pantser" rather than a plotter. My creative juices only start to flow once I am immersed in the story, fully engaged and racing with it, and if I had an outline telling me what was supposed to come next, I would feel frustrated and straitjacketed. Knowing me, I would toss out the outline and go with the new idea.

That's not to say there's no discipline or no just plain slogging in my writing process. Brilliant ideas and leaps in the story do not come all the time, and in between those leaps, I still have to create coherent scenes, make the characters consistent and vivid, fashion the setting, etc. But that magic of the imagination is the centrepiece of the process.

I think everyone's access to magic is unique, which is one reason why I've never been a fan of "how to" books. A writer can learn a lot about creating character, dialogue, setting, vivid language, etc. - all the mechanics of our craft - from books and workshops, but I'm deeply suspicious of "experts" who try to tell you how to craft a novel. Seven steps to the perfect novel, etc. Useful guidelines if you're stuck or self-editing afterwards, but the first draft needs freedom from rules. At least my first drafts do.

In that vein, what helps that freedom? What encourages that magic? We all have our favourite writing places and our favourite rituals – those places that nurture inspiration and bring us a sense of transcendence. Aline alluded to the view of trees and hills that brought peace and connectedness, that sets the mind free to float. Nature does that for me too, but not just any nature. I think it's nature that hints at infinity, like the vista from the top of a mountain, or the shores of an ocean, or a glorious sky at sunset, or, strangely, a fire.

Nature transports, but not always to peace and tranquillity. Sometimes it is awe-inspiring, fierce, or wild, and all these feelings can find their way onto the page. So sometimes I choose my location depending on the emotion I need to write the scene.

Most of my favourite writing places are close to nature, either on a chaise long on my deck or on the dock overlooking the lake. Or if it's wintertime, curled up by the fire. There's something primal about fire and water that seems to stir the subconscious.

The power of imagination

by Rick Blechta

Jackson modeling his new
formal wear line.

We babysit our grandson, the inimitable Jackson, twice a week. He’s all of 26 months but progressing nicely, thank you. Besides being a genuinely nice person (and in his “terrible twos”, I should point out), he is playful and like all young people, has an active imagination. Since our relationship is quite different than that I had with my own two children, and probably also because I’m older, I notice more about him than I remember noticing when our guys were little and time for reflection was short indeed.

We also don’t have a television, never have, as a matter of fact, and I think that has a positive effect on Jax’s imagination. Even when we need some space to get things done when he’s here, we can’t plop him in front of the “idiot box” to provide some none-participatory entertainment that will allow us to work unimpeded. Consequently, when he’s over here, he has to make our own fun, and since I’m more playmate for him than anything else, I let him take the lead and enjoy watching what he comes up with as well as being his partner in crime.

My theory is that we’re all born with good imaginations, but like our muscles, they need to be exercised regularly or they atrophy and don’t function well. Also, we’re born with an innate sense of fun and the absurd. Just growing up can beat all of that out of anyone in a short time. The trick is helping it survive while life is happening to you.

My grandson has a very blessed existence right now: two loving parents, doting grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Everyone who comes in contact with him is charmed by his personality. I’m not saying he gets his own way in everything, but Jax is indulged.

One result is a very vivid imagination. He’s constantly coming up with games to play and obviously making up his own stories — although the plot often isn’t immediately clear to outsiders or even those close to him. Over the past few weeks, he’s come up with two terrific games to play with me. I let my “inner child” loose and play along with him, adding to what he’s creating. I’m the proud discoverer, for instance, that our cars can fly — and do quite elaborate tricks — if we only remember to open their doors. They also crash in the most spectacular ways if some little scamp closes them while they’re up in the air!

Perhaps writers of fiction are able to tap into our inner child more readily than most and that’s where our ideas come from in the way Vicki spoke about in her post yesterday. We’ve gotten older, hopefully matured a bit, but still use our non-atrophied imaginations to see ideas that can be spun into stories, regardless of their length, then populate them with real (grownup) imaginary friends, just as we did when we were little.

God bless the child…