What If?

Someone is emerging from the sea of churning imagination; the writer’s intuition is peaked.  Could this be a character for a story? Details define slowly, all random & particular to a distinct environment which has yet to be sufficiently clarified. Still—the small actions & tiny peccadillo's which filter back to our conscious mind begin to suggest a complexity which may render this advent suitable for developing fiction.

These ghostly sketches are initially unpredictable. Once the suspicion of a creative breakthrough begins to take hold & engineer the excitement that only early discovery is capable of generating, the tendency to hone & stimulate these barely formed characters is present. In our excitement, we yearn to know more — the intricacies we suspect are attached to these barest of imagined beings, if demonstrated, will determine whether or not we have struck creative gold.

Confident they will continue to form consciously, we are advised to wait; patience is the vehicle which will serve as the mediator to our acquaintance. We might observe this nascent character in a completely private moment or we may catch a glimpse of them being somehow challenged. We observe their response & grow to understand them a little further.

If fortunate enough to retain the thread which delivers repeat encounters, we begin to permit curiosity the opportunity to lead into discovery. Is there a predominant philosophical apparatus at work which, if sufficiently identified, will open further an aperture of understanding? Conditions attached to this character start to make larger pronouncements; we discover, then catalogue what we have been shown.

Once clarified to a suitable degree of constancy for the imagination to sustain, we might begin to serve our fictional characters some conditions. It is through these questions & the hypothetical—the sober & ridiculous scenarios we project them into somewhere in the imagination allow us to rely on what we understand from the emergence of the initial hunches. We take the character & run them through a gamut of fantastic potential.

The bravery & vulnerability this character demonstrates in face of conjured instance will be of great use when determining the narrative this character will eventually exist within. This is the process of discovery which plows us into the world of letters & is best unleashed inside a network of causes & imagined consequence—this is how our characters come to the page.

In time, we learn more of who we are working with so import this new, defining character into increased specifics as defined by revealed morality & ethic. The temptation to graft & transpose what we are being shown on the activated screen of imagination, with what has been stored in unique, ambitious warehouses of memory, might ideally be minimized—it is patient observation which will guarantee a more complex genesis. Left to its own methods, the imagination will reveal all details required for the assembly of a world for the notional to grow & experience.

As writers we provoke & test; integrate & blend.


[Images by Ekaterina Panikanova}