Where stories come from

Where do stories live before they're written? Are they like a cobweb, dusty in my unconscious, a chaos of interconnected strands? Are they the real, walking people, that I've met in my life, the books that I have read, the landscapes that I've seen?

It's interesting to ponder on the meaning of the word 'imagination'. When I was a child, I was often accused of having an overactive imagination, because I often made up stories, and during particularly hard bits of my childhood, lived entirely in a world of my own making. A dictionary definition of imagination says that it is the ability to sustain in one's mind objects not physically present at the time, or to create in one's mind objects -in the widest sense of the word- that have never been wholly perceived in real life.

Here's the crunch of the deal for me. Wholly perceived. Because to me imagination is a great big mental blender, that takes bits of reality and mixes them together into a new thing, one that has never existed before. Without these quantum of reality, there can be no imagination. We can't imagine something in a vacuum: even the wildest science fiction or fantasy finds it is grounded in real-world things. (Which is why we can have no clue what aliens might be like if they exist, but that's a different debate, best saved for another time).

So, as I write my novel, I start with things that I have seen, things that I understand. My characters are sprinkled with my some of my personality traits, some of my history, and the history and traits of people that I know, or have heard about. But the point is, that they aren't those people, and neither are they me. They're them. Like one's children, one can see family resemblances, perhaps to a number of relatives, but essentially the new combination makes them into new people.

Enough for now.

Love to all


Sylvia