Imagination or inspiration- what makes the better writer?
As a young writer, I often struggled with this question. I thought it was imagination that made someone a better writer. But now I know better. With over ten years of writing experience under my belt, I have come to understand that imagination is rarely divorced from inspiration.
And so, I wanted to share this piece on inspiration. Specifically, inspiration drawn from real-life events. Now, ‘real-life’ is a broad term. It can tackle historical events, it can tackle events that have happened to others that you know of, or it can be drawn from your lived experience.
Writer, write what you know.
Bestie, we have all heard this in some creative writing class or the other. And like many, I also mistook it to mean, lived experiences. But knowledge is so much wider than that. It’s a rich tapestry of all your senses, and your mind coming together, to give you an eureka moment of understanding. Empathy plays an important role there as well as facts. And while it is important to know which stories are not ours to tell and be sensitive in our tales about communities not own, inspiration can come from everywhere. You can know things by living them, experiencing them, helping someone through them, or hearing of them.
But for the purposes of this, we will focus on deriving fiction from your lived experiences. While one way to do this is to write a memoir, there’s no rule saying that you can’t create fiction based on events you have lived through. And girl, I speak from experience. While not an exact recounting, my experience with therapy and mental illness shaped a lot of my novel Siya.
It was just experiences. Nope. My interpersonal relationships, my values, my worldview- all came together like ingredients in a dish. Things friends said to me became quotes. Insights from my therapy sessions, when applicable, become cornerstones of the story I was trying to tell. For example, one of the favourite quotes from Siya is, Ketki’s “you are worthy because you exist.” My therapist said to me in the middle of a therapy session. When placed in a story which says “you are enough,” in the next few chapters, the quote hits harder.
Taking a popular saying and a lesson from therapy together, I could enhance the story I was trying to tell. Using a combination of inspiration and imagination, my struggles merged with those I thought a girl living with eco-anxiety would go through. Siya is not me, but she is informed by my experiences, and I think that made her a more realistic character.
But…how do you do this?
And where do you draw the line between taking inspiration and hurting people?
Well, there too I have experience. In my currently out-of-print work Welcome to Olympus High, thirteen-year-old me naively drew my friends’ entire personalities on page in some places. While that novel was mostly imagination, informed more by Enid Blyton’s work and a pre-teen’s worldview than my actual experiences at boarding school, some characters were my friends in the flesh. Sure, a few felt honoured. Others were outraged.
And honestly, it probably wasn’t the best writing.
I am not saying you cannot base characters off of people. I advocate for that. But it has to be done with respect and permission, where applicable. It is rarely a good idea to force a character to be like someone you know to an extent where that character is no longer an individual but a self-insert.
But I have an entire blog on characters, so I will instead speak about scenes, and experiences. One of the first things I learned in my Writing a Scene course on Coursera was that a scene should appeal to the senses. Not be overly descriptive, but vivid. You and more important your reader should be able to feel what is important for the character to feel. Now this is easier when we are writing a scene that we are describing from memory, in my experience. When writing something we have imagined, we tend to focus on the parts that excite us the most. Which means we might tell the reader things that are fun but not important- and while this can happen when writing something inspired from memory, it is likely we will remember the important enough to highlight them.
And if we are mixing the important bits from memory with details from our imagination, we end up with a cocktail that I think makes for an interesting and impactful story. For example, recently, a reader told me their favourite quote from Siya is by Manasi. The quote went something along the lines of “I can live without you by my side but I cannot live in a world where you aren’t there.” Now to the reader this shows the intensity of the friendship in one line.
What in my opinion makes this more impact is that it is being said on Siya’s hospital bed, while Manasi is in a relatively cheerful environment. The contrast between the two and the fact that Manasi chooses to focus on Siya’s presence over everything else, heightens the scene. A quote said to me by one of my best friends, when I was in a bad place mentally, placed in the right scene, shows the correct blending of inspiration and imagination and how they form an impactful dialogue.
The story of mental health struggles might be inspired by me but the true joy of reading Siya lies in the magic realism, according to many. And that, while imagination, comes from a dep desire to be able to show the world what I feel. That real feeling tickled my imagination to think of what would happen if someone could do that, show people a world through their- not through metaphors or art- but their memories itself…and when that idea merged with my struggles with mental health and how raw they could make me feel, it turned into, what would happen if someone with those powers lost control of their abilities, like I lose control of emotions. The idea became a metaphor for mental health struggles, a visual device for what losing control of your emotions during a spiral can result in.
Inspiration meets imagination! Bam!
While there is much more I could say on this subject, I would like to end with this. Be respectful when drawing inspiration from reality and lived experiences. Be mindful of what you are comfortable with the world commenting on, even under the guise of fiction. Because at the end of the day, you mater.
Stay tuned for more writing tips, tricks, and spiels.
Author’s Note: Hopefully, this piece was as valuable as ChatGp said it is during beta reading, in the absence of my regular editors. If it added some worth to your life and you wish to show support, you can share, review, or pay what you will. Let me know which writing topics you want me to cover next and don’t forget to head the trigger warnings when reading Siya. Have a great day ahead.
Updated- 07-01-24
