Garbage, the quintessential alternative rock band of the 1990’s has left a hole in my heart for many years now, ever since their downfall with their disastrous album beautifulgarbage . Thankfully, every now and then I find myself rediscovering Garbage’s earlier work, all of which I fell in love with the first time I heard their moody songs.
Garbage’s fantastic debut album (blandly named Garbage) featured hits like Stupid Girl (see below) Vow and Milk,all of which helped propel the band to instant success back in 1995. I was twelve at the time, the optimal age for an entree into rebellion and Garbage’s emotional and grungy style was right up my ally. Surprising actually, since most of the lyrics focus on the negativity of being a duped female, that I, a tom boy extraordinaire, was so taken with the band. Ah well, memories and all that. Thirteen years later and Stupid Girlis still one of my all time favorites, it’s just one of those tunes that hits a cord with me…and makes me think, how the hell did thirteen years go by!? Lord Almighty, I’ve got to stop reminiscing, it’s making me depressed (quarter life crisis here people.)
In Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger discusses issues of identity and modes of belonging, all of which talk about being participants of social practices and configurations that go beyond the mere here and now. To connect with situations, people or events that are beyond their direct physicality, people have to sometimes use their imaginations. As a creative writer, this concept is paramount to success, as imagination becomes a gateway to connections and ideas. For instance, a writer may not have experienced a certain event, but they may know enough about the context and practices to be able to create a valid interpretation of reality.
On page 173, Wenger describes imagination as “creating images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating from our own experience.” Is this not the very epitome of what it means to be a writer? To create strong characters, mirrored worlds and believable narrative, doesn’t a writer usually draw from their own real life engagement, taking day to day interaction and practice, using it to transcend time and space into the deeper recesses of imagination, where connections and process are recreated into fiction?
I know that drawing from my own experiences with life has been the only reliable source of knowledge I can draw from when I begin to write. Fiction writing can be especially tricky and many believe that it is easy to ‘make believe’, but the opposite always turned out to be true for me. When creating fiction, even subconsciously, I drew from previous real life experiences to be able to concoct an alternate reality, because that was the only way I could make connections and move forward with a story line. The human brain always looks for patterns of familiarity, so it makes sense that we always look first to what we ourselves are engaged with day to day, then manipulate those observations and stretch them into something new.
