Memory and imagination are inherently linked: everything we build in our imaginations is the product of the raw materials supplied to us by our previous life experience—i.e., our memory. Because all memories are faulty, to one degree or another, empty spaces open up in our minds, which our imaginations can then take advantage of and fill.
In his The Writer article “Let your imagination play, Bob Blaisdell expounds on South American author Jorge Luis Borges
When our everyday memory dissolves, as it will, it leaves a blank canvas for us to fill with imagination. “Although reality is exact,” Borges reflected, “memory is not.” … Compared to an inability to imagine, the tangible effects of imagining (producing artwork, books, music) are scarcely important. We can imagine, whatever our artistic limitations…. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.
In a sense, authors have to forget in order to imagine. As Polish literary critic and Pulitzer nominee Francine du Plessix Gray
Purify your mind of toxins of memory. … Writers have to have this kind of digestive process for the psyche.
If we’re writing strictly from memory—whether that be in the construction of fact-based non-fiction or the reconstruction of real-life settings for our novels—we’re not creating. We’re just recording. Nothing wrong with this, of course. The facts are the vital ingredient in convincing readers to suspend their disbelief.
But few of us will argue that the true joy of writing comes in the raw, primal act of creation. When we forget the facts, deliberately or not, a vast unpainted plane opens before us, like an artist’s blank canvas, begging to be filled with wild splashes of color.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you find that your memory and imagination play together? Tell me in the comments!
