Create an Encyclopedia of Your Imagination

Welcome to Magic & Ink, a newsletter about magic, fantasy writing, and the creative life.

I’m stepping out of my comfort zone with this one to share a video about a fun creative practice you might enjoy. I hope you’ll tell me in the comments if you enjoyed it, and if you’d like to see more!

I love blank books. I’m sure I’m not alone in this: it seems to be a common affliction amongst writers and other creative people. Nothing says “potential” like a pristine notebook or journal, the pages as yet unmarred by the imperfections of ink or lead. It doesn’t matter if it’s a handmade tome of embossed leather, filled with thick, cream pages, or a $3 composition book from the drugstore, every blank book has its purpose and its season.

Today, though, I want to explore one particular blank book from my collection.

I bought this book way back in 2002, probably at a Borders Books. At the time, it was somewhat unusual — definitely an unusual choice for me, with its plain black cover that does not match my aesthetic at all. Instead of lined pages, it is filled with grid paper¹ and it’s HUGE, maybe 500 pages. A veritable Tome.

As a life-long fantasy writer and sometimes-tabletop gamer, I knew this Tome was made for one thing: worldbuilding. Grid paper = maps, am I right?

But the truth is I’m not a very good worldbuilder. I love coming up with ideas, but sitting down and writing anything comprehensive about a setting gives me the bends. There’s no faster way for me to lose interest in a project. So I knew I would never turn this book into a world “bible” for whatever story I was writing about at the time.

But I didn’t want it to become another general-use notebook, either, a scattershot of notes and partial drafts that are quickly out of date. I didn’t want it to be discarded replaced when it was half full, a fate too many of my notebooks suffer. This Tome required a unique purpose.

Thus the Imaginaria was born.

Part repository, part creative practice, the Imaginaria was conceived as a way to generate fantasy ideas. My own personal encyclopedia of imaginary things, if you will.

I kept the book in my nightstand, intending to pick it up nightly (or at least a few times a week) and fill a page with some new land, magical object, fantastic creature or other invented idea that might or might not be useful for future story writing. The ideas weren’t connected at all. They could take different shapes — a hint of a map, a badly sketched artifact, a few paragraphs describing some phenomenon or other. They might have story potential, or they might just be interesting in their own right. If an idea wasn’t actually interesting, it didn’t matter. The point was the effort put into coming up with something new on a regular basis.

I was pretty good at coming up with the ideas, but where I failed (where I’ve always failed) was making a consistent practice out of doing so. That’s why, 22 years later, there’s still only about 25 pages filled in the Imaginaria. I don’t blame the Imaginaria for this. I’ve had too many creative challenges over the past decades, and the Imaginaria was easy to push aside when I had enough time and energy and creative juice to work on anything at all.

But the Imaginaria never left my nightstand, even while other journals and diaries and notebooks came and went over the years. I knew it was a good idea, even when I couldn’t find the inspiration or energy to use it.

I’d like to change that.

The first step is moving it away from the nightstand. I don’t know what I was thinking: bedtime is rarely a good time to try to do something creative. That’s when I should be winding down, not reving up. Other kids of journaling make sense—diaries, brain dumps, gratitude, etc.—but at the end of the day, my faculties for creativity can’t be at their best.

So I’ve moved the Imaginaria into my writing room, newly refurbished with a lovely old desk and lots of accoutrements that make me feel energized and creative. It joins a stack of other journals that I’m using regularly right now, so it will be easier to remind myself to pick up this one once in while, too. And since I’m making an effort to sit here and work on my novel at least once a day, I should be easier to make it a habit to reach for it when I am in my prime creative flow.

Are you interested in starting your own Imaginaria? Here are some tips:

1. PICK A BIG BOOK. A small notebook might seem less intimidating, but the “less intimidating” also means “more limiting.” There is an implied challenge in aiming to fill 500 pages with ideas that forces you to think expansively. You WANT to push your limits with a project like this. As they say, the best work happens when you are the most uncomfortable.

2. KEEP IT PRIVATE. Think of this as a guideline, not a rule. If you make sharing your creative work your primary impetus, then you are going to start editing yourself before you make a single mark. You won’t allow yourself to make bad work or messy work or incomplete work or work you think your followers won’t like. Your Imaginaria will stop feeling like a sketchbook and more like the final project. When I started the Imaginaria, social media didn’t exist, and though I had a blog back then, digital photos weren’t common, so sharing what I wrote in my journals wasn’t even something I considered.

3. BE MESSY. I mean, sure, if you write and draw beautifully, please use those skills. But don’t let making something pretty interfere with the process of pure invention, which is the point of the Imaginaria. I can sometimes write neatly, if I think about it, and I while I can’t really draw or paint, I can make pretty looking journal pages when I feel like it. But it takes time, time I’m using worried about presentation instead of content. Content is the goal!

4. BE FAST. The only consistent thing in my Imaginaria (besides messiness) is that all the names are really bad. That’s because good names can be time consuming to come up with, and since they don’t matter in this context, I don’t let them worry me too much. No one else is going to see them! This goes for letting yourself get distracted trying to make things logical or consistent, too. Rule #3 applies here: your thoughts can be as messy as the journal itself. Good ideas can be fixed later, if you want to pursue them. But in the Imaginaria you should just focus on generation.

5. BE EASY ON YOURSELF. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Some of what you come up with will be intriguing and full of potential. Others will fall flat on their faces. That’s ok. Remember that it’s about the process, not the product.

In the video, I share a peek inside my Imaginaria, including going through the process of adding a new entry (my first since 2018!). It’s my first effort at making a video like this, so please be gentle!

Do you think you might try making an “encyclopedia of your imagination” yourself? How do you go about capturing your creative ideas and inventions? Share in the comments.

Thank you to everyone who has stayed subscribed despite my erratic publishing schedule. Your support means everything. And if you’re seeing this and haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so. I’m always happy to connect with other fans of fantasy and creativity!

See you next time!

1. Grid and dot-grid journals are common now, but twenty years ago grid paper was only available in pad or spiral notebook, not bound books.