Rambles on imagination

Everyone has an imagination. How else do you think, as children we came up with all these games and sometimes “wacky” ideas that we played? But, when we get older, that ruthless imagination in my opinion, seems to “mature” as we do.

At christmas I sat down with my brother and sister who are a lot younger than me and still have the ability to use their imaginations for anything and everything as they play. They know I like making up stories and loved it when I asked them to come up with their own and told them I would write it down for them (in fact my sister loved it so much she asked me if she could do it again the very next day! :))

It was an interesting exercise for me, because I learnt that the beauty of children's imaginations is that they really do think of anything and everything, yet the little logical bits in between doesn't matter. My sister for example, came up with ideas that were all very science fiction based (much to my amusement!) and at one point in her story, the main character “christmas teddy” landed on the moon.

Yet he'd been on earth seconds before hand and I remember asking, “But how did he get to the moon?”

She didn't answer because she was too excited by the story she was telling me, and it was here that I realised that myself, as an adult, I do tend to change my stories so that it seems to make more sense.

I wouldn't make someone land on the moon without a spaceship around somewhere. :P

In a way, this “logical” thinking was why we decided to completely change Heartstones. The old script in a way was Kathryn and I getting everything out in a bit excitement at what we could do. And because the story, characters, and world just developed so much as we went through the next six months of writing that when we looked back at it, we realised that that bits of it didn't fit or make sense anymore.

And of course we're going to want it to make sense. How many times have you seen a film and come out of the cinema stating “well the visual effects are great, but what the heck was the storyline about?!” and then it ruin the whole film because you had no idea what it was about?

So why wouldn't we go back and refine it? The 200 + page “excited” version of this story isn't something that I'd want to put up online. Not because it's bad, but because everything changed so much I don't think it'd be very wise to. Of course, at the time we were writing/developing the “excited” version we had no idea that we may one day look at it and decide to completely change it. But it needed to be done, and I really do think that we made the right decision because it's a better storyline and I know I've certainly enjoyed writing it more than I did before, partly because I was excited to get to the dramatic bits that I knew were going to happen.

The editing of the final version of Volume One of Heartstone Odyssey has officially finished, and the changed version is now sitting with Kathryn, awaiting to be drawn out. :)

And that feels great. It adds to the excitement of what happened last week with our grades and the thoughts (and realism! :P) of going to university, and in a way, is everything we've been working towards in the last year and a half.