visualizing

Stop Sympathising. Start Visualising.

A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...For imagination sets the goal __icture_ which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of __ill,_ as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.

No matter how difficult your life gets, find a way to hold strong to your peace of mind by positively interpreting your negative experiences, counting your daily blessings, and visualizing your future opportunities and possibilities.