Imagination practice
When is the last time you daydreamed on purpose?
January brought sickness and February brought sorrow. Two weeks ago, my sweet father-in-law died at the age of 91. He was one of the finest men I’ve ever known. Gentle, courteous, dignified, thoughtful, a quietly wonderful storyteller, a seeker of peace. He’s been a part of my life since I was 20 years old. I’m so glad and grateful to have known him.
The funeral was supposed to be last week in Virginia Beach. If you live in that part of the country, you know the city was walloped by a fierce winter storm. Twelve inches of snow, several flight cancellations, a blizzard of phone calls and rapidly changed plans. It looks now we’ll be flying back east in late March.
Which means: it’s time, way past time actually, for me to get well and truly started on the new book. I’m keen to tell you more about it, including the title, which makes me smile when I think of, but the novel hasn’t been officially announced yet so I’ll have to wait. Soon, I think.
I think I’d best stick to the one practice that will keep me on track.
100 Days
After the rocky time we’ve had, I want to have fresh start energy, but I’m feeling as puhzausted as wee Rilla in the photo above.
Well, nothing to it but to do it, as we 80s kids heard our fathers say every time they had a big chore to tackle.
Lots of folks are making new beginnings right now—yesterday was Day One of the 100 Days Project. Kortney is writing about it, if you’d like to know more. As always, I have about seventy-eleven activities I would love to declare I’m going to stick to for 100 days in a row, but I think I’d best stick to the one practice that will keep me on track to meet my February 2026 book deadline, a date that already feels unnervingly close, given the shape of things.
The practice is so simple as to seem completely obvious: work on the book every day. At this stage, “work on” means reading, researching, noodling, and most importantly, just sitting and thinking. Doing what Eric Maisel calls a daily “imagination practice.”
1. Set aside some imagining time, maybe twenty minutes or even an hour.
2. Smile a little, by way of alerting yourself to the fact that you mean to get dreamy and visit faraway places.
3. Slowly silence your busy thoughts. Imagine that you have a knob, like the knob on a tuner, that you can turn to lower the sound. Lower the sound on your thoughts until they are extinguished.
4. Keep smiling, even though the ensuing silence is a little unnerving.
5. Wait, holding the heartfelt intention that you will keep the door to your imagination open for as long as it takes, until blue elephants, space settlements, or your new novel strolls right in.
6. Wait, smiling,1 as if the moment to open presents was rapidly approaching.
7. Keep waiting. The longer you wait, the stronger the muscle you’ll build, the one you flex when you want to imagine.
—Eric Maisel, A Writer’s Space2
For me sitting and thinking this most often means stitching and thinking. My imagination works better when there’s an embroidery hoop in my hands.
But yes, long before 100 days have passed, I’d best have the writing well underway. I wrote a few chapters for the proposal, and since this one is my first novel set during my own childhood (not autobiographical, but I was about the same age as my main character during the summer of 1980), the research is already a delight. I get to mine my own memories and the culture of my eleventh year. Trapper Keepers, rainbow suspenders, pickle-scented stickers (remember those?),3 and Xanadu.
One hundred days brings us to early June. Here in Portland, that interval spans crocus season, daffodil season, tulip season, cherry blossom time, bitterroot, apple blossoms, early peas. The poppies will be coming up, and the asparagus.
One hundred days I won’t want to rush through.
Sometimes I think of big writing projects like this (or any big project, really) as being a lot like riding my bike when I was a kid—say, that eleven-year-old in her ribbon barrettes, with ribbons streaming from the handlebars too. You’d have to pedal furiously, lungs straining, to get up a big slope—and then came the long, glorious sail to the bottom of the hill. Over and over, the determined effort and then the exhilarating flight. Bikes had wings, back then.
With a creative practice, it’s like that but the long slope is in the mind. The first few minutes, for me at least, are like pedaling uphill. The effort of focusing my attention long enough to move past what the flow folks call the struggle stage—it feels to my brain a lot like the way my leg muscles burned as I powered my bike up the big hill. But if I keep going, I hardly notice the last moments of the climb—the top of the hill is in sight, and I’m in flow, ribbons flying.
Day after day, that’s the work. Get on the bike, pedal just long enough. It needn’t be a big hill every day. And in this era of distractions and worries (so many worries, gosh, I’m not writing about them in this space but I’m paying judicious amounts of attention and will do what I can, where I can, when I can—just not here), what I mean by the daily work is the Imagination Practice. Sitting and thinking. Stitching and dreaming. Doodling in a spiral notebook with a No. 2 pencil like an eleven-year-old who just got her very own Trapper Keeper.
When’s the last time you daydreamed? When’s the last time imagination was an activity you chose to do—did eagerly, with childlike relish?
Okay so I don’t know about the smiling part. I see Maisel’s point? It’s meant to signal something positive to your brain, infusing the mental activity with warm feelings. But..I dunno, seems like the self-consciousness would inhibit freely flowing thoughts. YMMV.
This guy!
So much to love here! I had a Schwinn bike with banana seat and streamers at the end of my handlebars and playing cards in my spokes so they'd make that rhythmic sound as I rode my bike.
I like sitting outside and watching the trees sway in the wind and imagine what it would be like to sway in unison with such grand creations. Sometimes I'll sway anyway!
Good luck with your book and look forward to reading more!
what a delightful, beautifully written post. thank you.