Imagination Applied to Creative Writing

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.