Imagination

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

Imagination is the ability to see what isn’t there. For a writer that means creating whole worlds, populated with believable characters and their experiences, seemingly from thin air.

There is often something that sparks that imagination and gives it wings. It can be a casual conversation, a billboard, a flash of color out of the corner of your eye, or, as in the above picture, an interesting knot on a tree.

To me it looks like an owl. Not just any owl, a sentinel. A creature that comes alive after dark and guards some hidden passage to another realm. The creature is obviously otherworldly and only by using your imagination can you see that it’s not truly hidden in the daylight hours.

A picture like that can keep me thinking for some time about a possible story. I’ve not stretched into the fantasy realm yet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy giving my imagination free rein.

Every time I stretch my imagination it enhances my writing. It doesn't matter what I’m working on, it can be another Fountain pen story for the collection coming out this fall, or a book like “Out in the Dark”, or a satirical short story blending elements of Steampunk and SciFi into a future where women in hoop-skirts and petticoats race in their own spaceships alongside men in a race to be the first to fly around Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

I think Albert Einstein says it best: 
   
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein