Writing fiction requires imagination. So does reading fiction. But what kinds? Are both writing and reading imagination the same? Let’s take a closer look.

Daydreaming is passive imagination, thought clouds drifting by. Solving math problems uses cognitive imagination. Designing a table to be constructed in your garage woodshop, or mentally planning the route you will drive to a football game, involves practical imagination. Picking your wedding colors engages esthetic imagination. Rearranging your closet to put your clothes into a new pattern is the use of active imagination.

Writing fiction is a heavy exercise of creative imagination, the forming of new concepts and imagery. Readers, meanwhile, employ receptive imagination, which allows them to form mental pictures out of what is, at first, only text.

Writers. Readers. In creating and in reading stories, the types of imagination used are similar but somewhat different. This is important. It has implications for the writing process. Some of what you write will stimulate readers’ imaginations. Other things that you write will not.

To sort out one thing from the other, we first have to go deeper down the rabbit hole of how imagination works as a process in the brain.

Down the Rabbit Hole

The human brain has twelve “regions of interest”, areas of processing. The right brain is vision related. The limbic system stores images, emotions, smells and behavior. It’s also the repository of long-term memory. Perception and imagination share the same neural mechanisms which allow us to “see” the sunset, “smell” the salt air, “hear” the waves.

Story imagination is only possible, then, because of data stored in the brain: memory, thoughts and even self-awareness. Everything that you’ve seen, seek, want, been through…all that makes you who you are, is the stored data that makes imagination possible. You draw on this data to write. Readers draw on this data to imagine your story.

Pause on that. Your own stored data goes into what you write. Literally, you write what you know. However, readers are drawing on their own separate bank of stored data, which is not exactly the same as yours. Thus, you can only stimulate the reader’s imagination when the reader has something similar or analogous in the storage bank.

There’s something else, the “salience network”. This means that what is perceived, processed, and stored is then prioritized. Repetitious and routine experiences like opening a jar of jam will not be prioritized. You’ll quickly forget that this morning you opened a jar of jam. Higher priority is given to what is new, novel, unexpected and emotional.

Now, if you are a member of my extended family, your brain will give higher priority to the experience of opening Christmas jams that are homemade and shipped annually by moi, Donald Maass; jams which are made with my special flavor combinations of blackberry-cinnamon, strawberry-anise, golden-plum-cardamom and peach-spice. Those jams have high impact: olfactory, taste and emotional. Yeah, I know. That sounds like bragging, but those jams are eagerly anticipated and highly appreciated by my family. In my family’s memories, the experience of opening those jams is prioritized. (Sorry, it’s a limited release and I don’t take orders.)

So, readers can imagine your story when there are 1) sensory cues, and 2) emotional cues, which connect to what they, readers, have experienced in the past. You can observe this phenomenon when readers talk about what they’re reading. “That’s just like what happened to me when…” Or, “It feels like that author is writing about me…” Comments like those are evidence of the connection being made between the author’s data bank and the reader’s data bank.

It would seem, then, that the keys to getting readers to imagine your story are sensory descriptive detail and emotional situations. To a large degree that’s true; however, there’s more to it. How strongly imaginative cues work also depends on the reader’s state of mind while reading. (Hey, I warned you. We’re deep down the rabbit hole.)

Imagination is a synthesis of remembered elements of previous sensory experiences or ideas…as modified by unconscious defense mechanisms. What that means is that when your reader is relaxed and receptive, having a positive experience in reading, the imaginative cues you send will be more effective.

The bad news? Reader imagination will be less stimulated by an overly-familiar opening, off-putting characters and an unpleasant emotional environment. If the reader is alienated, feels hopeless or discouraged, imagination is dulled. That may sound like alarming news if your novel is a thriller or any fear-based story meant to fill readers with dread and anxiety. Or, for that matter, if your story involves conflict of any type—which surely it does.

Relax. Breathe. Remember that stimulating imagination is a process of using cues to connect to readers’ data banks, as well as emotional engagement and novelty. You can get readers in the mood and receptive to your story in any number of ways. To summarize, when readers connect, when you make them feel positive, and/or in some other way reward them for reading, they are able to imagine.

But wait, there’s still more. The deepest influence you can have on readers is when your story activates the four pillars of human flourishing: 1) purpose and meaning, 2) control, 3) competence, and 4) connection.

Okay, that’s a lot to process. What does all this mean in practical terms for day-to-day writing?

Practical Imagination

Here are some imagination-stimulation principles to keep in mind. As readers, we are more imaginatively open when…

• …characters are open to us and to themselves: observing, perceptive and self-aware

• …we are given sensory cues to aid visualization and association

• …our emotions are activated

• …we discover and learn new things

• …we get, in any form, surprise and novelty

• …we get the ah-ha and uh-huh of recognizing human experience that we can relate to

Well, that’s nice but what are you supposed to do with that? How does it apply? Here’s more:

Characters are open when handled with immersive POV. (Opaque characters can work too, but there’s a trick to that which is a subject for another time.) I’ve posted previously about immersive POV HERE.

• Immersive POV replaces flat description with the full experience of things, from the meaning of a teaspoon to a shift of mood in a room to the terrible beauty of an explosion.

• Emotional reading doesn’t come from reporting character emotions; it comes only from stimulating reader emotions. I’ve written an entire book on this topic, which you can find HERE.

• Novelty means many things, not just plot novelty but unexpected narrative approaches and even creative use of language. I’ve previously posted about that HERE.

• Discovery is made of reveals, layers peeled, motives plumbed, interesting information…basically anything that we that we didn’t previously know.

• Connection comes when we encounter what is universally human. I’ve previously posted about that HERE and HERE and HERE.

Onward

What I’ve focused on today is the writer-reader imagination connection, mostly how imagination is stimulated in the reader. But what about you, the writer? Whether you outline or not, look down from an overview or proceed upward from a granular moment, you must in some way imagine your story. What’s involved in that?

There are three processes by which writers imagine story, and each has strengths and shortcomings. To work with those, have a look at a prior post of mine HERE.

I mention all of this today to point out that when writing a story, you imagine it. You may also think that your readers will imagine it in the same way that you do. Not true. Only some of what you write will trigger reader imagination. To do that, you need certain things on the page: openness, emotional stimulation, surprise, discovery, and the human situations, feelings and behavior which, in some way or other, recall the situations, feelings and behavior that we all have experienced.

To summarize, if the reader is going to imagine your story, you must equally tell us a tale that we’ve never read before, in a manner that’s fresh and exciting, and which nevertheless causes us to recognize ourselves and connect to what we ourselves have been through.

You write from you and also write for us all. No problem, right?

Which writers have engaged your imagination more than others? Why?

[First published on Writer Unboxed]

Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).