So who has the imagination the writer or the reader?
So who has the imagination the writer or the reader?
As usual, I was thinking about this in my waking hours of 3:00 am, the great time when the greatest thoughts occurs and in which by the time I wake up I forget the. But this time, I have pondered this for several nights. We as writer’s have been gifted with imagination in so many forms. I meet writer’s almost on a daily basis who have the great power of imagination and take people to world’s and places I have never hear of or dreamt of. They describe in detail the pain, humiliation, joy and life of the their characters. But I wondered without the reader where would our worlds of imagination printed on black and white be? It is the reader who takes what we hope to come across and brings it’s the foreground of the reader’s imagination. We can describe a tree in detail but it is the reader who grows the trees and brings it to life. In my book, My Soul to Keep, yes I know shameless advertisement, but the killer is cutting the skin of the heroine. I can write those words the knife sliced her skin in two and blood welled and poured down her thigh. Those are words that I am trying to convey but only the reader can see through their own eye what that is and the imagination the pain of the character. Practically everyone has had a paper cut in their life that left jumping up and down or cut some vegetable and one wrong slice left a red line of blood welling on their fingertip. Without these experiences the writer is merely a crafter of words. You may then say what about the make believe worlds of Gene Roddenberry or George RR Martin, they created beautiful worlds and described them in detail, but it is still readers who bring the characters to life through the minds eyes because of our very human experiences of pain and sadness. It is what compels us to keep coming back to these stories. I make believe some of the places in Albuquerque, I describe an adobe church. Anyone can look up adobe on the internet but why you keep coming back the story after a coffee break is what is happening to that character. So for me it is the reader who has the more imagination because they take the black and white words and make it reality.