Exploring the Imagination

The Power of Imagination. Image by DP Studios and Wallpapers on Web.

What is a writer without imagination? It is the font of creativity, the well-spring of art that keeps us moving in a dry, dry world. Reality may lend forms to what we drink, but the imagination – the imagination breathes detail into those shapes. As Emily Dickinson once wrote, “The Possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination.” Such a beautiful thing to comprehend.

Which is why I am always curious when a head cocks at the sound of what I do. I write, I say, and I see the eyebrow arch. I enjoy the fantastic. Fiction. Fantasy. Their heads shake and I hear the words, “Why not write something real? Something substantial? Non-fiction is the bread and butter…” And I smile, just a bit, at the concept. They scorn it because of the lack of “real value” to the world. Real value? My goodness, how do we even begin to define…is not the power of the human imagination, the power to showcase how far that human thought can reach, not worth documentation? Every bit of writing employs imagination, to an extent. Fiction or non-fiction – those are merely scales of extent.

Even non-fiction has details we fill in. Auto-biographies, narrated years after the fact, might embellish a detail for the storytelling, reflect on events long gone and add a line, here or there, that prod at the curiosities of our own imagination. They pursue thought, not merely deeds.

As I get closer to releasing my first fantasy novel, though, it is a curious thing to reflect on – this concept of imagination, and where it stands in our society. So much fiction,  fantasy, sci-fi, and what you will flood the market, yet all too often you hear those calls for structure, for the sensible, for the restriction of the imaginative from sources populating that same reality. The disconnect astounds me.

Henry David Thoreau. Image care of Wikimedia Commons.

But that leads me to a few new quotes for this week, revolving around that sense of the imagination, and the creativity it walks with hand-in-hand:

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.  Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
~Theodore Geisel

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” 
~Francis Bacon

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” 
~Henry David Thoreau

To Write: Love and Creation

Writers hold worlds in their hands. (Not my creation!)

Time is the writer’s friend. Strange to hear, I’m sure, but it’s true. Deadlines and date may be the staple of the craft, but for all the stress time heaps about our heads, it remains our greatest treasure. Day after day, we practice our craft, we hone it, as one would any other skill. We are possessed by it, in libraries and open mountain air, beside the hearth fires or lounging in the bustling street-side cafe. We love it. We hate it. Time strengthens the bond, strengthens the craft..

And lets us create:

“You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads…may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
~Ray Bradbury

Writing: Astonishment and Exploration

“A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes.”
~William Sansom

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
~E.L. Doctorow

Writing: The Author’s Art

It’s a special day – a sound start to what I hope will be a fine week. Certain conclusions are wrapping around this writer’s brain and nearing reality. Excitement is in the fingers and on the mind – but such things must be teased out…As such, creativity’s heavy on the mind this day, and below, I’ve got another pair of writers’ quotes to engage you.

And later, a big announcement/update that’s been a long time coming…stay tuned! (Along with a few smaller announcements are also contributing to this curious sense of happy.)

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which ones to keep. “
~Scott Adams

“Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.”
~Edna Ferber

Writing – Wit, Soul, and Taste

For the writer, there is nothing quite like the sensation of writing. Of crafting a world full of character and stories. The type doesn’t matter. It is the sensation, the craft that stirs us – and so it is only fitting that learn of writing from the beautiful words of other writers:

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.”
~Truman Capote

“Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together.”
~Buffon

“Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory.”
~Chateaubriand

A Touch of Civil Disobedience

Given the present presence of “protest” that seems to be engrained in the global mindset – Arab Spring, Anti-Wall Street Rallies in the U.S. to name a few – I think it would behoove me to put up a few words on “Civil Disobedience” for this week’s quotes for thought…

“Laws control the lesser man.  Right conduct controls the greater one.”
~Chinese Proverb

“You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality.  Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.”
~Malcolm X

“Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.”
~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

It’s all in Perseverance

“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.”
~Henry Ward Beecher

“He conquers who endures.” 
~Persius

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. ”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literary Quotes

BOOKS! Image care of Wikimedia Commons, from the New York Public Library.

Today, at least in the U.S., the literary world finds itself in a curious crossroads. With the advent of the “e-book”, you hear a lot of people (mostly writers) bemoaning that it shall surely mean the death of our precious hard copies of books one day. While, frankly, I think that’s more than a slight over-exaggeration, regardless of the end result, one thing remains true: books, literature, will live on. Whatever form they take, man will always have a thirst for reading.

Today’s quotes address books specifically, and their place in this curious little society of our, ever-changing as it may be…

“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.  It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” 
~Edward P. Morgan

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” 
~Charles W. Eliot

“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.”
~Kenko Yoshida

People, Peace, and Past

For these United States, yesterday was a day of remembrance. Ten years past, terrorism struck the heartland in one of the biggest horrors the nation has ever witnessed. It was one of those moments blazed into the psyche. Into the soul. Hardly a person can’t be turned to and asked, “Where were you when the Towers fell?” In many ways, it was a moment that defined this generation, for this and many other countries as well, as it kicked off ten years of war, fear, and globally shifting ideas of security.

Suitably, the dedications yesterday were far reaching – the connections, the memories, and the tears all treated with the highest of honors and dignity. Today, on this, the Monday of Quotes, the Waking Den would like to share, in the same vein, a few words throughout the ages on people, peace, and the past…

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance.  It is also owed to justice and to humanity.  Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong. 
~James Bryce

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. 
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs.  The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past; between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists. 
~William J. Clinton

Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose. 
~Turkish Proverb

The past is our definition.  We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. 
~Wendell Berry

New Beginnings

Well fellows, when last we met I was pulling into my new life in Golden, Colorado – in mountains and prairie and that open air of the American West.

It’s been a strange week since then, one with its ups and its downs. Being my natural clumsy self, within the first 48 hours I managed to get in a bike accident that took off most of the skin on the bottom of my palms. However, I also managed a great deal of exploration, photographic discovery, and plenty of quality time with family and their friends.

It’s an interesting place, Colorado, and the land is made infinitely better by family. Undoubtedly, in the days to come I’ll have more to say on the mountainous terrain – more pictures and more poems to give homage to the majesty to be found here, but today, to start this new week out, and to re-establish the normal flow of things around the Waking Den, I would like to kick things off with the latest Quote of the Week, with this week’s focus being family, in all its wonder. Cheers, all.

“An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.” 
~Spanish Proverb

“What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.” 
~George Eliot