Whenever someone says “always”, “never”, or “everyone”, be very suspicious. I am too of my own utterance. Never write another novel? Never say never again! However, at this point in time, and with enough experience behind me, I do feel that way: I will likely never write another novel in the foreseeable future.
Why I feel that way might be a useful thought direction to you as well, especially if you’re a writer, but also if you’re simply someone interested in what art and expression mean in today’s world. More still, what forms creative writing takes and why I feel a novel is currently not among my favorite such forms.
Here’s one of the reasons why I may “never” write another novel: I’ve begun painting, which feels like a more direct, more idea-based form of art, compared to a novel which is a sustained, in-depth exploration(more…)
Are there “kinds of imagination”? It would seem all imagination is, if not the same, at least “good”. “Imagination is all I want from you” an 80s song goes – yes, I’m getting old – and with only minimal… imagination, we can totally picture a writer looking in the mirror and whispering these magic words.
After all, it would seem impossible to write without imagination, since it refers to our ability to form ideas, have thoughts, or even experience emotions that, though perhaps inspired by our environment, are not directly available to our senses.
For example, when you see a red car brightly reflecting the afternoon sunshine and it triggers a memory from your childhood, that’s imagination. Indeed, if you can “see” a red car reflecting the sun while you’re reading these lines, that’s imagination too!
However, imagination is a tricky concept. Because of its abstract nature, imagination can come in various forms – as perhaps you noticed already in the few paragraphs above. For instance, it takes one kind of imagination to watch a film and then write a review about it, and entirely another to create a modern art installation.
The key issue, then, is to be able to recognize these forms imagination takes, and take advantage of them according to the needs of our writing. As I will show you in this post, we could think of three kinds of imagination – creative, productive, and reproductive – each with its own patterns and applications.
This image “doesn’t exist” in that it’s not a real photo; it’s made with Bing Image Creator. However, it also makes me imagine a multitude of things, because it’s anchored in childhood images – which also reveals the power of AI for writers, in ways they don’t quite realize! (more…)
A Summer Evening in Another World is a collection of flash fiction stories I wrote in the span of two weeks some time ago. Flash fiction refers to stories that are shorter than short stories. Some stories might be as short as a single sentence, though on average, stories in A Summer Evening in Another World are about 500-600 words each.
In a way, with this collection I took much of what Tell Me, Mariner was about and overcharged it. Part metaphorical, part magical-realism, part Kafkaesque, the stories in this collection refer to experiencing, to society, to our individual (and collective!) place in the world.
A Summer Evening in Another World cover. Background art made with Bing Image Creator(more…)
