Write what you know – or what you imagine

In a blog post last week, I took a little look at writing about things you know nothing about. In a similar spirit, today our topic is imagination: a valuable tool for all writers, particularly when you’re trying to write a story about a space traveller having yourself never stepped foot out of the British Isles.

In fact, along with the ability to put sentences together, I’d say imagination is one of the most crucial aspects of being a writer. Without it, there would be no stories in the first place, let alone leaps of faith and dreaming minds that can either lead to stunning works of literature or a steaming mess in novel-form but either way are more interesting than a story about nothing at all.

Imagination is also what gives our work much of its originality. As well as the benefit of your unique experiences and view of the world, how your imagination works will have a huge impact on who you are as a writer. It influences the kind of things that you write and how you go about writing them. It lets you write about things you will never be able to experience in real life.

Plus as writers, we are also relying a lot on the imagination of the reader – their ability to fill in the blanks for themselves and flesh out in their minds the story you have written for them. The success of fiction depends on us all having the ability to some extent to make-believe.

I think that’s a wonderful thing. We spend so much of our lives bound up in the practicalities of things that it’s brilliant sometimes to be able to let all of that go for a time and make something up instead. Whether from the perspective of the writer or the reader, imagination is something none of us could be without.