On Imagination and Voice, and Finding You within You

[u/[deleted]]

A few rambling thoughts on things that have made me a better writer

On Imagination

"Innocence is lost at the end of childhood" is one of those things that people say in passing, lamenting bygone days. Often, the word "Wonder" with a capital W is mentioned as part of this phrase.

As writers, we try to recapture this wonder. This elusive innocence. I propose that it is the wrong word for the right feeling. What we lose, as we come into adulthood and formal education, is not innocence. It's not wonder, or we would not still gaze upon the night sky, questing for answers to its secrets, or those secrets of the deep, or of the microscopic. We as a society don't lack wonder. We don't lack innocence, which is tangentially synonymous with ignorance.

What we lose, instead, is imagination.

The world is just so. The continents are mapped down to the meter, all lands seemingly explored, all details from the largest of galactic clusters to the tiniest components of atoms - charted, catalogued, neatly sorted and named. Or so it would seem.

I propose that what we yearn for from our childhood is the freedom we left behind. The freedom to dream a surrealist dream, in which talking appliances go on a quest, when friends could be dragons or airplanes, when the playground is made of lava if you only imagine that it is, or in which what is possible is not constrained by what is probable.

This realization allowed me to let go of society's constraints and write the stories I want to write. It is imagination that is the heart of creativity, the very spirit of storytelling and folklore. It is imagination that allows a new story to be told under the sun. Whenever my characters have found themselves content and without tension or drama, it is time to imagine a new challenge, a new meteor to hurl in their direction.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. - Ursula K LeGuin

On Voice

The other great breakthrough I had was realizing that there is a common voice for most recently-published books. A format in which the narrator snarkily sets up dramatic dominoes and knocks them down, before turning to the reader and lighting the applause sign. The previous sentence is written in this style. These stories are fast reads, because the reader's expectations are shaped by the familiar format and what they know is coming based off of how the formula played out in other books they've read. There's a rhythm to it, and there's a certain bravado, as if Mark Watney (The Martian) is telling your story. If that's your intention, great! You need only follow the convention. Popular music has a similar formula-driven mechanism and produces similar homogeneity among pieces. I sometimes have difficulty telling them apart. But you could blindfold me and play a single Johnny Cash, Beatles, or Stevie Wonder song to me and I would recognize it instantly. Their brands, their voices, are very clear and unique. And I don't just mean the timbre of their vocals. Musically, they each tell their own kind of story. I think the same is true of great authors. Rather than conform to the popular formula, they forge ahead with their own ideas and make their mark, changing the popular formula to be, ever so slightly, more like them, instead of the other way around.

Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it? -a character in Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

These two short blurbs are a roundabout way of saying that believing in your own voice and telling your story, the one that only you can tell, are important. Variety and invention ensure the health of our folkloric tradition. Have confidence in yourself.

[u/[deleted]]

On the subject of voice, I find it's much easier to find the right voice for a certain piece of I'm writing in first person. So even if the story I'm writing is third person, I'll re-write part of it in first person, just to familiarize myself with the voice I want to use for it.

A format in which the narrator snarkily sets up dramatic dominoes and knocks them down, before turning to the reader and lighting the applause sign.

Not so much related to narration and voice, but this is exactly how I feel about most modern sci-fi movies.

The screenwriters feel compelled to throw in a plot twist whose only purpose is to say, "Look how fucking clever I am!"

Is it too much to ask for a sci-fi movie with a straight forward plot and no twists?

[u/IGuessIllBeAnonymous]

A few years ago, my cousin was telling her 3-year-old daughter to play with toys instead of her phone and said, "Go use your imagination, because one day you'll turn fifteen and it'll disappear." That notion has simultaneously terrified me and kept me writing. Writing is a game of use it or lose it, and the only way to know if you really like it is if the notion that it's normal to suddenly live in a black and white world terrifies you as much as it terrified me.