To dream the impossible dream

I have no imagination. That may sound strange considering the fact that I'm a writer, musician, dancer, teacher and mother. How can I do all that without imagining?

I create out of what's there. If it's not there, I can't make it up. I dance the steps I'm shown, I sing the notes on the page, I rearrange the statements from an interview into a meaningful story.

I guess I'm more of a sculptor than an painter. Give me a blank page and it stays blank. Give me a chunk of words and I'll chip away the garbage until the beauty underneath shines through.

My dream is to write a novel. I've been working on it for the past year and I'm not so proud to announce I have....one page. Not necessarily the first page. (It is a very good page though!!)

The thing that's blocking me is that I can't seem to make up things about my characters. Even if I could, it feels like lying. So everything about them and everything they do is from either my life or someone close to me. (Right now the guy is sort of a combination of Tony, my dad, and Ray Goertzen, if you can imagine that! Short, furry, and loves airplanes.)

If I haven't experienced it myself then I can't imagine it happening at all. Which means I'm giving away a lot more of my secrets than I'd like through these characters! How do other people feel deep down about God, sex, death or their own elbows in their most honest moments? I don't know!

So either I need to get comfortable with telling the world my secret fantasies and insecurities or I need to learn to lie. Or God needs to infuse me with a serious dose of imagination. He created an entire universe no one else had ever thought of before, so maybe he could show me how to create a story world from nothing too?

Or maybe I should just stick to writing truth. The truth that I know. Like "How to be your best unemployed self" or "10 things, I hate, about commas" or a commentary on the "Intertextuality of Ezekiel." Informative (for the 1% of the population who would care) but not very inspiring.

No, I have a need to create. A God-given need to lead people towards beauty: the beauty of a Creator who "can do more than anything I can ask or imagine."

Imagine that.