Boice mentioned in his article that what is as same important as motivation to help writing is imagination. While I was reading, I couldn’t help asking these questions: Where does imagination come from? Is it something we were born with, or something that we need to train ourselves to be good at with?
My husband used to say that I was one of the most imaginative people in the world, because I would always have the wildest and weirdest dreams during the night and to tell him when I woke up the next morning. But am I an imaginative writer? If you ask me to answer this question, I’ll never admit it, because just like many of my students, staring at the topics which were irrelevant to my life, and holding the pen in my hand on the blank paper for couple of hours, I still, couldn’t generate anything creative or interesting to write about. I would and could write up an article freely and fluently only when I, myself, had the life experience about the topic. To be precise, this type of articles does not belong to the academic writing category. They are often journal like articles restating what I had gone through, which left me deep impression.
Does imagination have anything to do with artistic ability or handcraft making type thing? If the answer is yes, and imagination does require a lot sense of art, then probably I’ll include myself to the non-imaginative people section, because I am always clumsy doing those kinds of stuff.
Boice’s article also talked about how information collecting may help generate imagination… I kind of doubt it…I’d rather say it is the information that we collect and take in that help with our thinking -- to think about a wider range of matters, which we perhaps pay little attention to, and to think about a particular issue more deeply, more critically. Could that also be termed as Imagination? Is imagination part of our thinking process? Why each time when I look at the word imagination, I could only think of something wild, unreal, and non-existent in this world, which we create only in our mind?
I too struggle with the definition of imagination. I consider myself a pretty good essay writer, but I certainly do not consider myself imaginative. I read, I take notes, I make connections, and slowly a paper comes into being (which is really very similar to the process described by Sirc and Boice), but I am still not convinced that this is "imagination." I would say I am a good reader or have a sound grasp of theory; I connect imagination to fine arts and creative writing. I suppose the processes are similar, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it all.
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