"Imagination as a writer is the ability to spontaneously create images and actions within your mind that dramatize situations taken from life."

Take this short quiz and see how much imagination you have.

  1. As a boy did you make up fantasies all the time about yourself being successful in overcoming danger?
  2. As a boy did you make up stories of finding valuable things that became yours alone?
  3. As a boy did you make up stories that seemed real to you about coming upon scenes of danger to others in which you did the right thing and rescued someone else being attacked or in danger in some way?
  4. As a girl did you make up stories about how much a certain person liked you and wanted to be with you and tried to make you happy all the time?
  5. As a girl did you see yourself growing up into a beautiful woman who looked so beautiful and was admired by just the right person who grew up also to be a significant person who made good money and would buy you beautiful clothes and take you to wonderful places?
  6. As a girl did you dream of growing up and getting into real troubles in which a bad man seduced you and made you a kind of slave who made you do all sorts of dirty things for him?
  7. When you found yourself in difficulty as a child did you keep quiet and say nothing, or did you start telling a story about yourself that put you in a good light and not the bad light that you were being accused of?
  8. As a child did you make up bad things to do and fantasize about them, or even try and get some other child to act out these fantasies with you?
  9. As a child did you fancy yourself being in different kinds of roles, or being a different person from the child you were?
  10. As a child did you love reading adventure stories about people who did exotic and important things.


If you can answer Yes to many of the above question, then chances are you have writer-imagination.

Don’t think of it as a disease! Maybe you can make money with your ability? Maybe you can successfully write story after story as novels that will sell to a lot of people.

You have writer imagination. You are already ahead of yourself, even if you do not know that much yet about writing craft.

DEVELOPING WRITER-IMAGINATION

Are you willing to undergo a training course in developing writer-imagination, starting right now. No one will need to supervise you or tell you what to do like a regular teacher does.

Here is all you have to do!

Turn you intimate relationship, or family relationship, into a constant drama, just like you might see in a modern comedy movie. Do the following at home or out on a date.

  • exaggerate everything happening at the moment.

example: when you make contact with your date for the evening exaggerate a description of them in the moment. Focus on an object they are wearing and make up a story about it on the spot. “Oh, a former boyfriend had a tie just like that . . .” and off you go into the realms of imagination.


  • whenever you have a few moments with someone tell them a story about yourself that happened recently, only make at least part of it up. “You will never believe what happened with me and Cindy just the other day . . .” Of course we won’t believe it, but can you make it entertaining?
  • develop your ability to lie. Don’t tell the truth unless you have to because the situation is serious and must be solved in reality.
  • take some popular novel at the beginning and re-write it quickly. Read what is printed there and add an incident that comes to you. Exaggerate the novel situation. If you can’t with that novel, take another story you can easily exaggerate with your imagination. This way you find what kind of literary subjects you might be good at exaggerating.
  • to give you courage, when you go to a party again, let your imagination flow about a certain person there. Imagine yourself acting in certain ways with that person right there at the party. Now when you have the two fantasies developed, go up to that person and act in ways similar to what you have just fantasized and see what happens. You may find the other person responding to the fantasy you act out and weave around them. Take it a little way only, but not all the way. This is fantasy work. Reality work is where you act in a certain way and are serious about what you do with that person and want to take responsibility for the results of your actions. Acting out fantasies is where you are creative with someone but you are not committed to enacting in full the fantasy with that person. You only dance around the edges of your fantasy.
  • think of yourself as a normal person and see how you act, what rules you act from, how you expect others to see and react to you. Now see yourself as a writer. How are the rules you act from different? How do you see yourself acting and people around you reacting? How can you ‘blame’ being a colorful writer on how you act? As a writer can you see yourself as a more colorful and sought after character than you see yourself as a normal person?
  • as a writer how do you see yourself in your life? Are you as colorful as some of your characters in the stories you imagine and write? When you write are you one of the characters in your own story, or all of them? How do you act out in fantasy each of your characters?

Now you are developing writer imagination. One caution. As an expert psychologist dealing with people and their night dreams, I warn you to be careful. This means that you tell one person close to you what you are doing in developing and sometimes acting out your imagination. If you have weak ego boundaries this might mean that you cannot tell the difference between you as a simple, real and grounded in everyday life person and you as a fantasy personality. As a person develop being in the writer role to use writer-imagination, but also use ways to step out of the writer role into an everyday grounded person.

You see this when top tennis players are interviewed on TV. Their danger is thinking that because they are famous as a tennis player that they are as human beings also famous. Nothing is further from the truth. When they step into the tennis player role then they try to act out consciously being a great tennis player. However, if they go around in everyday life acting like they are a great person they are not human but something like the archetype of the hero. Napoleon with his hand in his coat and acting still like an emperor when he is in reality completely defeated.

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Developing writer-imagination can be dangerous. Go to the edge, but not over it. Too many writers have killed themselves, thinking that they were somehow other than they were as human beings. You are not immortal though the words you use and the characters you produce may have the spark of immortality.

You must imagine characters and situations greater than your own life. Yet don’t be these yourself.

Don’t stab your wife. Don’t befriend killers, don’t drink alcohol in excess, don’t play games with people, don’t fool around in secret behavior without at least one intimate friend or lover knowing what you are doing, don’t call yourself a writer, call yourself instead a human being.

Go to the edge but not over it.