“I have a great story to tell and a free day ahead of me, so I’m going to stop procrastinating and make some serious progress today… Right after one more cat video.” 
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“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.” - Richard Feynman
Personally, world-building and integrating fictional lore to flesh out the realism in my first project uses a lot of the version of “imagination” proposed above. Reminds me that building a different universe within one’s head is painstaking process and therefore it’s just as well that I enjoy it. I am learning a lot about my own optimal creative process as I go along. I think I go about it in a reverse way; I first think of an environment and add in the features, before moving to the characters last. I treat as some sort of thought experiment. I set up some n number of variables that I want to “test”, then I let the “visuals” play out. If the “visuals” collide with each other in this mental playground and produce some new interesting combinations, then I take care to remember them and find a way to integrate it to the growing web of infobits I have.
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“Do it for the money :DD”
“There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.”
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“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“All of this was well meaning bullshit. But bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald’s secret sauce.”
Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Also, this is a rule a live by while writing:
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
(And also pretty much everything in these two books)
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Oh yeah. On Writing is just essential. I am a huge King fan, but even if I wasn’t the objective value of a lot of his techniques introduced in there is hard to argue against.
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Hmm… I’m going to need to give with a Kurtz quote from Apocalypse Now:
“I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius!”
“My characters deserve to see the light of day” thats my mindset but I’ve also always been a fan of Charles Bukowski ‘So you want to be a writer.’ Which is a tad long to re-copy down here.
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“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
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“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” -MAYA ANGELOU
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A new one.
"Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now it’s complete because it’s ended here.” – Frank Herbert
Definitely something to remember whenever you’re working on a project with no oversight but what you want.
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“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
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A few comments made to me this week by various folk inspired me to pull out this quote, attributed to DaVinci (or Picasso, or Auden paraphrasing Valéry—take your choice):
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
And Valéry’s full remark:
A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
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