How do you give your imagination a workout?

Writing life: 104

I wrote a post back in January entitled The artist, the art, and the audience. I won’t rehash it here given how recently it was published, but it did set me to thinking about how and whether various art forms incite audiences to use their imaginations. To me, it seems reasonable to posit—or imagine (see what I did there?)—that one’s imagination works like a muscle. The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets. It also stands to reason that our creativity is driven by, or through, our imagination. With that in mind, writers have an interest in strengthening our imaginations and in boosting our creativity. After all, imagination and creativity fuel our writing.

As I was thinking this through, I began to consider how our imaginations are triggered or stimulated, and which art forms intuitively kickstart our imaginations and why. For the sake of brevity and perhaps clarity, I’m going to focus on two art forms—films and books.

Caveat: I don’t know how much scrutiny my little theory can withstand, but it’s fair to say that I’m not talking here about ALL films or ALL books. I’m just drawing some modest directional conclusions as I think it all through.

What happens when we watch a film?

I love movies, particularly on the large screen. So what happens when we watch a great film? Well, if it’s a nice theatre, we sit down in a really comfortable, plush and padded seat, we lean back and rest our weary head on the cushioned headrest, and we wait for the film to start. And when it does, we let it wash over us. We gratefully “receive” the audio-visual feast of a good movie.

We can clearly see the film’s setting on the screen, whether a beautiful natural landscape in the wilderness, or a bleak urban streetscape on the wrong side of town. Whatever the setting, we see it clearly—exactly what the director wants us to see. Then characters start appearing. We also see them in perfect focus. In an instant, we take in how they look, how their hair is styled, what they’re wearing, how they’re walking and talking, whether their face is average, attractive, or stunning. Through their words and actions, we begin to judge what kind of people they are—good, evil, loving, kind, cruel, smart, funny, talkative, taciturn, etc.

But there’s more. The musical score backing the film suggests how we’re supposed to feel at that moment in the film, or if it’s foreshadowing, how we might be feeling in a few minutes.

Here’s the opening scene and credits from one of my all-time favourite films. These vivid visuals and propulsive title song set the film’s creative table and invite us into the story in just the fashion the director wanted, without much if any call on the viewers’ imaginations.

We absorb it all through our eyes and ears, our minds and our hearts. Sure, a movie should also invite us to think, but because of how all-encompassing and immersive a brilliant film can be—and here’s where the cliché earns its money—it often leaves little, and sometimes nothing, to our imagination. Yes, a good film can leave nothing to our imagination.

Passive engagement

Watching a great film, is often an experience of what I’ve called here for lack of a better term, passive engagement. We’re provided with everything in crisp sharp focus: colourful visuals, orchestral soundtrack, brilliantly rendered characters, witty and thoughtful dialogue, exciting action scenes, emotional cues, etc. Everything is provided—sometimes spoon-fed—and we willingly, gratefully embrace it and escape for a couple of hours.

No judgment here. I love those movie experiences.

But are we exercising our imaginations when we watch a film? Well of course it depends on the movie. Sure, some films—say science fiction, or surreal—certainly trigger our imaginations. But even then, we’re still seeing and hearing exactly what the filmmaker wants us to.

So does that change when we limit ourselves to the written word alone?

What happens when we read a book?

I think reading a good book provides quite a different experience than watching a good film. We open to Chapter 1 and start reading. Eventually, and only through black words arrayed on a white page, we gain a sense of where we are, of who these characters are, of what’s happening in the story, of what might unfold if we keep turning the pages. But, as soon as we start reading, I think we also start leaning on our own imaginations to fill in the full picture—our perception of the full picture—that the words on the page alone aren’t always able to provide. Knowingly or not, our imagination kicks in. It has to.

In a book, a scene in a restaurant is described, including the decor, the layout, the chairs and tables, what’s on the menu, the host and the wait staff, and of course, the characters we’re coming to know sitting down together for dinner. Sometimes these elements are described in minute detail, but usually they are not. We writers can’t inundate a reader with too much detail. We can’t expect a reader to spend a few paragraphs or more of their time wading through a list of exactly what the restaurant looks like in excruciating detail. It would take too long and risk taking the reader out of the story. A film can provide a setup shot of the restaurant interior lasting four seconds. Another cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. If the author expended a thousand words describing the restaurant, some readers would start skimming. So writers usually provide a shorter, more modest description, and invite the reader’s imagination to kick into high gear to fill in all the gaps.

As readers, we don’t need, or often want, too much description. Based on the details the writer provides, our imagination—consciously or unconsciously—promptly conjures a restaurant scene in our mind’s eye. We can see it. Now, that restaurant mental image is going to look different across different readers, because we’ve all used our own imaginations, sometimes based on scant input from the writer, to paint this picture in our mind. We’re not all going to create the equivalent mental image.

The same is so for characters. When watching a film, we have no latitude—no choice—in how we view and remember the physical make-up of the characters. But in literature, that is not the case. When I describe my characters, I never provide full and detailed physical descriptions. I do offer some idea of what characters look like, but I purposely keep it a little vague, and don’t provide too much detail. I want readers to compose their own mental images of my characters based on their reading of my words, their own life experiences, including the people they have met in their travels. To a certain extent, each reader has a hand in “creating” my story’s players, my actors. I’m inviting readers to invest in my characters by assembling their physical images in their own minds. I think this draws readers deeper into the story.

And it’s not just character descriptions that I purposely soft-pedal. I do describe the landscapes, the street scenes, the houses and offices, the highways, the buildings, the cars, and yes, even the restaurants, but I try not to employ so much detail that the reader is bored—or worse, taken even briefly out of the story. I’m confident that readers create their own details in their mind’s eye, again, based on their lived experience, their memories, their knowledge.

I like to think I’m using the leverage of my readers’ collective imaginations to help create vivid images in their minds. Those pictures spring strictly from the story—and the words on the pages I’ve written to tell it—and my readers’ active imaginations.

Active engagement

If watching films—as noted earlier—is an act of passive engagement, reading feels to me more like an expression of active engagement, where readers almost become partners with writers in stimulating—exercising—the reader’s imagination to create the mental and emotional imagery needed to allow a book to fulfill its full potential, reader by reader. And those visuals and feelings will be different reader by reader.

Are you still with me? Does any of this make sense?

In the end…

So what does it all mean? Damned if I know. These are just my earliest musings about how art engages our imaginations. There’s plenty more thinking to be done before anything is etched in stone. But I am finding it a rather fascinating idea to ponder.

One could certainly undertake a similar back-of-the-envelope analysis of how, and to what degree, music, or sculpture, or painting, or dance stimulates their respective audiences’ imaginations. But I would not be surprised if reading, as the art form that seems to have the most basic and limited physical presentation—simply and only black words on white pages—will call upon the imaginations of audiences more than other art forms.

And is that a good thing? I think it is. I believe few understand what our imaginations mean to us in our lives. I just know I love having an imagination and something would be lost in my life were it to flag and falter. As a writer, my imagination is an essential part of my craft. And I’ve come to believe that the more I use my imagination, and the more I read and write books, the stronger and more vivid my imagination becomes.

And if we accept that creativity is closely tied to our imaginations, and that by reading we’re actually giving our imaginations a workout, then you can also reasonably conclude that more reading leads to more creativity.

So to answer the question the headline above asks—How do you give your imagination a workout?

Read a book.

I may well have taken a few leaps in logic in arriving at this conclusion, but if nothing else, I hope it stimulates some thinking and conversation among all of you. Let the comments begin!

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Wrapping up…

Thanks for taking a look at this. As always, I’d welcome your thoughts in the comment section below. And here’s hoping you’ll subscribe—it’s free and easy—so you won’t miss future posts. See you in two weeks.