Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

The world is filled with people who have too much imagination solely because the people around them have too little.

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

If we start off on a journey toward Mordor without our bearings, tagging along with people we know nothing about and care nothing about, we might decide to go AWOL.

No good ever came from not putting dialogue between quotation marks.

El juego creativo y la imaginación están en el centro de la vida de un escritor. La forma en que alimentamos la imaginación afecta a todos los aspectos de lo que escribimos y de cómo lo escribimos. Como dijo Jung: "El principio dinámico de la fantasía es el juego, que también pertenece al niño, y como tal parece ser incoherente con el principio del trabajo serio. Pero sin este juego con la fantasía ninguna obra creativa ha llegado a nacer".

The word “frivolous” lurks in the subtext of such opinions, along with the assumption that flights of fantasy have no moorings to reality, a tether believed by some to be essential. Yet completely un-utilitarian fantastical “documents” like the famed Codex Seraphinianus (created by Luigi Serafini in the 1970s), the mysterious fifteenth-century Voynich Manuscript, or writer-artist Richard A. Kirk’s “Iconoclast” imaginings have a marvelous intrinsic value no matter what we can actually glean from them. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland may or may not include some interesting life lessons, but that is beside the point of the mathematical precision of its frivolity. As the award-winning Australian writer Lisa L. Hannett points out, “‘ frivolous’ reading is as important as creative play. Reading for fun, reading to feed your imagination, reading to revel in the childlike wonder of being elsewhere.

WRITE WHAT’S RANDOM. Some writers require chaos to find inspiration. You might be someone who needs a jolt to the system—who needs to tell yourself, on seeing a duck wearing a sun hat, being led on a leash by a child, “I need to write about that duck, that hat, that child.” You don’t require anything more than surprise and the unexpected moment for inspiration. That sudden shock—that introduction of chaos into the world—serves as the catalyst back into writing what’s interesting, personal, or uncomfortable.

As much as possible, allow yourself to be a raw nerve end that internalizes whatever is experienced in life.

I’m not an answering machine—I don’t have a message for you! What I have for you is a story.

Be fiercely protective of your imagination, and nurture it.

Some people can stick to one type of writing and be perfectly happy. I’m not one of them. Once I knew that, and once I stopped trying to pigeonhole myself for the sake of a career and originality and beating Georg Büchner, I didn’t suffer any significant writer’s block again. The lesson I take from that experience is that the way to beat writer’s block is to get to know yourself better as a writer, and once you know yourself, accept yourself. You’re not Shakespeare or Joyce or Gertrude Stein or Theodore Sturgeon or Joseph Mitchell or Tillie Olsen or Fran Lebowitz or James Redfield. For better or worse, you’re you.

Think about how backstory fits the tale you're trying to tell...

Agency in fiction has to exist in the context of the worldview. Otherwise agency is not just meaningless or unconvincing, it is often laughable. Unfortunately, agency is often thoughtlessly given to characters who would not have it in reality.

...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind...