Jabrosky
Banned
I've always had a propensity to think in pictures. I used to believe this was universal across humanity, but my mom says she lacks this ability, so I am not sure how common it really is. Anyway, one of the symptoms of this pictorial way of thinking is that most of my ideas come in the form of mental images. Sometimes I envision characters, or more specifically how they look and what they're doing. Other times I see some kind of scenery like a landscape or architecture. At my best I may even see a whole scene playing out like a movie.
I believe this kind of visual daydreaming motivates my creativity more than anything else. I have pictures in my mind that excite me so much that I want to bring them to life. Sometimes I can do this through drawing, but very often I find my drawing skills aren't advanced enough to do my mental imagery justice. This may partly explain how I got interested in writing in the first place. If I can't draw something out, describing it in prose seems the next best thing.
Herein comes my longstanding problem: there is a lot more to storytelling than simple imagination. It's one thing to picture how characters and their backdrops might look, or play a movie in my head about the characters doing things, but very few if any readers are satisfied with that. What they want is internal psychology, or personality growth, or theme, or anything else too intangible for me to envision. Furthermore, whenever I have a particular scene in my head, it can be a pain in the ass to expand that scene into a whole story that goes far beyond the pictures I wanted to describe. And then there is the whole modern demand for lean and tight writing that almost eschews description altogether.
Epiphanies like this make me wonder whether writing is the right path for me after all. I love being creative, and I love sharing my imagination with the world, but having an imagination isn't enough to get anything done.
EDIT: I expect I'll receive the response that writing or any other creative production is always hard work whether or not your mind works like mind. Maybe this is true, but I've always worried that I might have a psychological handicap that prevents me from accomplishing whatever it is I want to accomplish.
I believe this kind of visual daydreaming motivates my creativity more than anything else. I have pictures in my mind that excite me so much that I want to bring them to life. Sometimes I can do this through drawing, but very often I find my drawing skills aren't advanced enough to do my mental imagery justice. This may partly explain how I got interested in writing in the first place. If I can't draw something out, describing it in prose seems the next best thing.
Herein comes my longstanding problem: there is a lot more to storytelling than simple imagination. It's one thing to picture how characters and their backdrops might look, or play a movie in my head about the characters doing things, but very few if any readers are satisfied with that. What they want is internal psychology, or personality growth, or theme, or anything else too intangible for me to envision. Furthermore, whenever I have a particular scene in my head, it can be a pain in the ass to expand that scene into a whole story that goes far beyond the pictures I wanted to describe. And then there is the whole modern demand for lean and tight writing that almost eschews description altogether.
Epiphanies like this make me wonder whether writing is the right path for me after all. I love being creative, and I love sharing my imagination with the world, but having an imagination isn't enough to get anything done.
EDIT: I expect I'll receive the response that writing or any other creative production is always hard work whether or not your mind works like mind. Maybe this is true, but I've always worried that I might have a psychological handicap that prevents me from accomplishing whatever it is I want to accomplish.
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