Accessing Your Imagination Takes Courage – Part 1

Accessing Your Imagination Takes Courage – Part 1

Do you ever shrug off a spontaneous thought, idea, flight of fancy afraid your imagination is too “out there”, crazy, impossible, laughable and audacious to pursue and instead settle for the predictable, the cliche, convention, the expected? Do you wish you had the courage in accessing your imagination to write something truly original, new, fresh, experimental and ingenious? In Part 1 of Accessing Your Imagination Takes Courage, I write about the courage needed to face external foes and antagonists. In Part 2, tomorrow, I write about the courage needed to face an even more insidious foe.

I had full access to my imagination when I was writing what became a bestseller The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Structure Any Writer Can Master and was surprised by the lack of imagination some reviewers seemed to have when the book first came out. I took lots of chances when I wrote the book and perhaps because my editor and publisher at the time allowed me so much freedom, I wasn’t prepared for the negativity.

Reviewers didn’t like that my imagination prompted me to use “she” instead of “he” as the prevailing pronoun throughout the book. Sure, somewhere deep down or not so deep, I was making a political statement — women represent more than half the population. Mostly, I was addressing my primary audience. In my workshops, conference talks and retreats, much more than half are women writers.

Some critics bullied me for my courage by calling me names for being “crazy” and “out there”, slamming some of the more intangible ideas I presented about the creative process, Energetic Markers and the Universal Story (think Coehlo’s Universal Language and Santana’s Universal Tone). As storytellers, I’ve always just assumed that writers are constantly accessing their imaginations, being visited by outlandish and whimsical characters and shadowed by dark and foreboding scenes. I just assumed that the reason we love to write is because we love living in our imaginations. How else do we see into worlds not yet discovered, explore the human heart, express hidden emotions and demonstrate universal themes on an intimate level? 

Now, thanks to that experience and facing my fears, I appreciate the courage needed to access your imagination and then to stand by and embrace your convictions, your creativity and your innovative and inventive stories against potential foes and antagonists intent on silencing you. In Part 2 of this post, tomorrow I write about the courage needed to face and then accept what you may find hidden in the shadows deep in your imagination.