I'm going to discuss some of what I spoke about at the conference. I found it very encouraging because I got plenty of very positive feedback. I'm not an experienced speaker and after this session about the imagination in particular, I went away feeling as though I was a bit of a flop and not very interesting or polished. Shortly after that, several people who had attended approached me to say how much they'd appreciated what I had to say. One lady about my own age even said that she had tears streaming down her cheeks because it was so perfectly what she needed to hear! Another older lady told me, "I enjoyed yours most of all because you're so down-to-earth and encourage us to believe that we can be writers too. Thanks for being so real." I really appreciated that. That's when I began to think, "Hey, perhaps my rough-around-the-edges style has advantages of it's own."

Anyway, here's the first part of what I had to say. How do we harness our imaginations to work in our favour? When you're beginning to write a story, do you write a few sentences, scrub them out and start again? Do you examine each paragraph and sentence as it comes off the pen and start trying to "fix it up" before you continue? I used to always work like this and found that I'd never get beyond a chapter or even a page. The most valuable tip I ever learned was to stop doing this.

Think of your mind as a 2-chambered organ. The Creative Chamber comes up with the brilliant flashes of inspiration and the Judgmental Chamber assesses and edits your work. They are both vital in your writing but they can never work as a team! If you try to use them together, they sabotage your efforts. They only real way of getting anywhere is to practise the following advice.

Always begin with your Creative Chamber and push the Judgmental Chamber out. Write whatever comes into your head straight onto paper without judging it. What you end up with will almost always seem ridiculous, untidy, boring, disorganised and trite but keep going anyway. Work through it. It is actually providing your work with fresh ideas, individuality, brilliancy, uniqueness and character. It's too busy being a genius to worry about legibility, tidiness, punctuation and sense. It's very important to forget about these matters for now and just keep your hand moving.

Next you let your Judgmental Chamber loose to work on it. This specialises in the bits I used to call "boring", sharpening and tightening what the Creative Chamber has come up with, correcting spelling and grammar, assessing parts of the storyline for merit and choosing alternative words to use. Now I've come to enjoy this part too but it didn't come naturally. I think our natural impulse is always to want to consider our finished as soon as we finish the first draft. I've grown to think what fun it is when the Judgemental Chamber does it work.

If your Judgmental Chamber tries to butt in while your Creative Chamber is still working, push it right back out again. Promise it, "You'll have your turn later." I can guarantee, you'll hate what you've written if you start to criticise it before it is ready. Give your Creative Chamber free rein because it is brilliant enough to deserve that much. And remember that it's supposed to be messy and disorganised. I like to imagine it as an absent-minded professor, complete with messy hair, odd socks and pencils sticking out of every pocket. And I think of the Judgmental Chamber as a prim-&-proper old-fashioned type of schoolmaster with every hair in place. That shows how absurd it is when we try to force them to work harmoniously together.

In our western civilisation, we tend to have very developed Judgmental Chambers while our Creative Chambers are the poor guys who are put in the paddock to go to seed. Think of using it as developing a muscle, just as weight-lifters go to the gym to develop particular muscles. It'll get stronger by use. I can personally declare that since I started working this way, my productivity increased by over 100%. I always work chapter by chapter. I write each chapter free-hand, then go over it several times with my Jugmental Chamber as I type it into the computer. This works well for me.

So to summarise:-

1) Keep your pen moving

2) Write down your first thoughts

3) Let yourself write junk.

And stay tuned for more on Jump-starting the Imagination.