The Enduring Imaginative Life
By FARHA GUERRERO
In correspondence with a fellow writer, I shared an idea for an epistolary novel that has been dwelling inside my mind for some time.
But in thinking about this, I also remembered watching Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges's very good friend, speak about something I might call the enduring imaginative life.
In a 1983 interview with Martín Caparrós, Bioy Casares said:
“Yo vivo con seis, siete, ocho cuentos por escribir y dos o tres novelas...”
I live with six, seven, eight stories waiting to be written, and two or three novels.
For many years now, I've felt that I share something quite similar. At any time, I may have multiple stories in my head, and certainly I may be reinventing them and imagining new ones constantly.
Stories come to me in several ways, often through one image that life gives me, an interaction with someone, one sentence, one word, places, things. A story will often compose itself during the early morning hours, or especially during my sojourns in the mountains.
Water, interestingly, is another setting in which I've experienced this many times: taking a hot shower, sitting by the pool, or sometimes spending time in a steam room allows me to compose a story on the spot.
There's certainly no fixed time to this process of creation. It can be perhaps seconds, minutes. I think the former is more true. But even in this brevity of time, once I formulate a story and can “see, visualize, and imagine” it, it does stay.
It's usually a process of many refigurings and imaginings. A sort of endurance.
In an earlier blog post, I spoke about the idea of having an invisible scribe, because in my experience, much of my writing process happens when I don't have my hands on the keyboard or a pen on paper.
What's very interesting to me is that once a story is written inside my head, so to speak, it never goes away. It lives in my mind, deep in my consciousness, until I finally execute it.
As I explained to a writers' group a few weeks ago, the first few sentences are all I need to begin writing short fiction. Once I have the first paragraph on the page, I can finish the story.
I currently have dozens of stories residing in my mind, many of which I conceived years ago.
What's interesting is that not only do I remember each story, I also remember its inception: often the exact moment and place where I conceived it.
There is, of course, an evolution that exists with fiction writing, and so even after its inception, a story can still evolve in my mind.
But what's important here, at least in my experience, is that once the story evolves enough in my mind and I start to write it, the act of writing itself is distinct. In fact, I might even argue it's a whole process in and of itself.
Julio Cortázar, in his 1963 essay Algunos aspectos del cuento, described how many of his stories were written almost outside his conscious will, as if he were merely a medium:
“como si yo no fuera más que un médium”
As if I were nothing more than a medium.
In a conversation I had with philosopher Dominic McIver Lopes a few weeks ago on my radio show, he explained that there is a moment of creativity that is comparable to the flow state.
As a climber, I have experienced flow state many times, both outdoors on the rock and indoors while training. It's a state of consciousness that may only last a few seconds. If I reach that state while climbing a particular project, nothing else in the world exists.
As a writer, I experience this often, but especially when I write fiction, which for me creates an extraordinary state of creativity.
Cortázar also writes in his 1969 essay Del cuento breve y sus alrededores:
“cierta gama de cuentos nace de un estado de trance”
Certain kinds of stories are born from a state of trance.
Cortázar's description suggests an even deeper state of consciousness.
But what's remarkable in all of this is that imagination and creativity are special forces in the mind. They can endure and evolve, giving rise to a rich and imaginative life.
Related Reading
Inception — a reflection on the origins of my short fiction piece Pomeriggiosera, published in Five on the Fifth.