The Language of Imagination
I love learning languages. Besides English, my native tongue, I’m almost fluent in French, was once fluent in Dutch, and have learned German, Russian and Swahili (not that I can speak them!)
You know my favourite language that I learned (which also happens to be one of the hardest)?
Imagination.
I am fluent in the ideas I have zipping around in my head; their meaning and images are crystal clear to me. But when I try to translate those ideas for others? When I try to get those ideas out of my head and onto the page? Wow. Talk about miscommunication.
That’s what writing is. It’s like taking a language only you know and translating it into a language your readers can understand. It’s hard to extract beautiful, abstract concepts from your imagination and turn them into something concrete another person can read.
How do you do it?
Start with what you and your reader have in common: story. A reader understands (implicitly or explicitly) the shapes and structures of stories, so when you start to put your ideas into those shapes and structures, you’ll start to communicate with them.
But like any language, it can take time, effort—and practice—to learn. Which means there’s no need for you think you should be able to “just write”. It takes time, effort—and practice—to write so others can understand your ideas.
We don’t learn a new language overnight; we don’t have to learn to write overnight, either.