After nine years in my house, I finally met my backyard neighbor (though for all those years I knew her dog’s name was Annie) because the fence that kept us invisible to each other needed to be replaced. As she went bounding up my steep yard she announced she was 92, and asked about me. “My daughter writes, too. She won the Nebula Award.”
Science fiction has not much interested me since Ray Bradbury in my adolescence – the recent tastes I’ve had of it seem immature. But with the recommendation of an annual award for scifi, I popped over to the library for her book. I discovered a medieval setting projected into the future, with six legged blue horses and distressed adolescent girls behaving as silly as my nieces in high school.
I can’t scold the author – she was doing what I recommend to writers: write for your audience in a voice they are comfortable with. But it sure made me sad that what passed for interesting reading was merely a projection of what is known into parameters as constrained as Dennis the Menace.
What I found missing was deep imagination. Tale of Two Cities: Madame Defarge, on behalf of the Revolution, encodes into her knitting patterns the names of those who should be sent to the guillotine. Even as a freshman in high school I was amazed at the depth of Dickens’ imagination. (With contemporary surveillance paranoia I might have suspected my own mother of recording all my infractions, for she was an avid knitter.)
If I receive for analysis and feedback a manuscript that lacks imagination, the writer will find the word “boring” repeatedly in the margin (this includes clichés). Feed my mind, expand my way of looking at things, delight me with unexpected perceptions: In the midst of a lovers’ quarrel in a redwood forest, Gisella notices dry black beetles copulating on a rotting log. In her fury she crushes them with her toe. Or: she suddenly acknowledges the indestructible cycle of life and the smallness of her melodrama.
Sometimes I suggest an alternative to enliven the story – twists of plot, resonant wording, a different voice, or interposing the narrator’s opinion. But generally, I don’t feel it is my job as an editor to add creativity where none exists – and I never figure that into my estimate. Whose manuscript is this, anyway?
Yet sometimes I do. It really depends on whether I find the story has literary or social significance. I’ve worked on manuscripts that are intended to activate a specific audience, but the writer lacks the experience to succeed in impacting them. If I resonate with their intention and want to support their work for its intrinsic value, I’ll make suggestions. If they simply can’t write, I generally won’t agree to help – unless they are hiring me as a personal writing instructor.
My advice: Write outrageous, go to Deep Space IX of your fabulous mind. You can always cut and slash and rein in later. Send your inner critic out for a brioche until you emerge from your writing den.
As an editor, stretching unimaginative writing into the miraculous is like pulling toffee. I confess there are times I do it, but typically my writers are not happy with the outcome, no matter how congenial the collaborative process. They can only imagine as far as they are used to seeing, like the Meso-Americans with the Spanish galleons (is that an urban legend?). It’s more helpful if I make suggestions about where the story might go, see if it finds soil to sprout in, and offer fertilizing guidance for them to remain interested in seeing what their story can grow into.
The best exercise I can recommend for developing imagination (as well as for going below mental knowing into our deeper awareness) is writing prompts. I like the rules Natalie Goldberg elucidated in Writing Down the Bones:
Set a timer (10 or 15 minutes is plenty)
Don’t let your hand stop moving
If your word train reaches the end of the line before the time is up, write the prompt again and see where it leads this time.
Here is a small sample of websites with prompts:
Creative Writing Prompts
Writer’s Digest
I suggest doing at least three prompts in a row without pause. The more absorbed you become as you write, the deeper the imaginative space you’ll reach.
Until next time, delight in the process.
Download PDF: DCC Editor’s Nightmare #4