I was going to call this blog, Imagination, but the Minds Eye sounded more, well, imaginative. I worry a lot about running out of ideas for books. I look at authors like Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper and Eva Ibbotson and the prodigious amount of work theyve done and I wonder how they keep it fresh; where they find their inspiration. Writing fantasy is sometimes harder than I expected because I need to create a world which may touch on this one, as it does with Feltus, but is believable as well as fantastic. I cant just take the reality we all know and superimpose magic things on top of it; there has to be reason and rationale and the things need to work and make sense. Scary. But thats what imagination lets us do, not only in the genre of fantasy but in any fictional writing where were creating characters and imagining small slices of their lives.
I love it when fantasy has a foothold in reality. For instance check out Philip Pullmans Oxford, J.K. Rowlings world, Jonathan Strouds London- all beautifully imagined within the sphere of a world we know or think we know. It taps into the hope we, or at least all children have, that there is magic out there; that if we dream hard enough, we can fly, we can escape unhappiness. Some writers are lucky enough to remember how they felt as children- I think I do- and can capture the exhilaration and sense of adventure and possibility we as kids took for granted. Maybe I write fantasy as my adult way to escape tax bills and laundry and all those other mundane things that drag us down. I just know that 9-year old Jo believed in Narnia; believed all my dreams were real.
The book Im writing currently is the third in a series so I pretty much have all my ducks in a row but Ive been mulling over a couple of new ideas for stand-alone books. Its always good to have a few rough plots for the future when the well might run dry. Of course I always seem to get my best ideas when theres no hope in hell of being able to sit down for a few weeks or months and really sink myself into them (see the Lucy Factor), so I use this time for research and I read a lot. One of the books Im thinking about is a straight fantasy, set in an imaginary world but the other is sort of like fantastic reality or realistic fantasy ala Nancy Farmers excellent House of the Scorpion. Im just plotting and letting ideas whirl around in my head; making notes; figuring out a cast of characters; trying to immerse myself in this created world and feel the heat, smell the smells, work out the logistics, use my imagination so that when I finally get ready to write it down on paper Ill be able to call up this store of feelings and make it seem real and believable.
My sons wealth of daydreams astounds me. Ive written about him before so I wont drone on about him again. Suffice it to say, he is currently immersed in the wonderful world of Moomintroll and has re-invented himself as the Snork Maiden. I should be so lucky.
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