With all the weaponry you have as an author, the most formidable is the depth, wealth and breath of your imagination. This is the only weapon which you can use and wield at and with your good pleasure. Never forget that.

Consider your imagination like a garden. What do you want to grow there? What do you want to plant? What do you want to remove? What causes the weeds, and how do you get rid of them? You control all things which come in, go out, what will grow and stay.

As a writer, you are the unique position to both birth new imaginations, as well as provoke the imaginations of others. This a position which we, us, of this ilk revel in. However, in the reveling, remember these three steps:

1.) Active writers are avid readers. From hardback to paperback or ebooks even audiobooks, writers read. There is no way around it. There should be at least one book you have started, trying to finish, or one you can refer to someone. Books and their knowledge are fodder indispensable to writers. Feed your imagination. Turn off a device if possible and read. Stephen King said in his book On Writing, that he read in what he called ‘sips.’ Whether it be in the grocery store line, waiting in a bank line or waiting to pick your kids from a school practice. Read. Read. Read.

2.) Research is fertilizer. I have a habit of looking up words I don’t know. I got this habit from my aunt when I would ask her what a word meant. I’m glad she did. From that practice, things that I wanted to know more about, I began to look up. As a writer, you will develop curious walking around information–odd things you know, or stranger things people have told you, which will work their way into your imagination. Expanding your knowledge base can only help you stretch you in your genre, or if you want to branch into another. Research gives your imagination permission to branch out into the unknown and record it.

3.) Roll it around. For any new project that I’m working on, I roll ideas around–meaning, I thinking the idea out. I call it ‘writing in my head’. In writing in my head, I can formulate what is I want to do, say, and record. It doesn’t have to make sense immediately, I just have to hold the thought. I have to be able to be confident if I hold on to this idea long enough, just maybe, I can make something of it. If I believe that I can make something of it, then I can write it down. If I can write it down, I can save it to extrapolate at  later date if I need to; the idea is preserved, ergo, protected.

Be brave, dearest ones. You can do it. Begin to do it. Investigate your imagination. What are you watering? What needs to be watered? Is there anything else which can be done to expand the garden? You as a writer determine all that–so get to it.

Jennifer P. Harris

Founder, Shekinah Glory Writing Services

[image from Google]