Imagination of Christmases Past, Present, and Future

All stories start in a place far, far away.

A place none of us can go save the one adventurer who braves this shadowy place of magical dreams and elusive characters.

No amount of newfangled medical technology, CT scans, or electrodes attached to the scalp have been able to transfer intangible thoughts, ideas—stories—from inside the brain to another medium so that it can be accessed by another human being.

So, travel with me into the far, distance past as we consider the Imagination of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

Imagination of Christmas Past (in the far—far— distant past)

Thousands of years ago, people longed to tell stories. Their options were limited to oral story telling and chiseling their story onto stone walls using pictures. Charcoal and berry juice, tree bark, even blood (yikes!) was used to enhance stories. Eventually, the written language came into play, and they added words to the pictures.

If there are any fonts that look  like they are
 chiseled in stone, I have never met them.
But the stone and the tough arm look cool! :)

In the far—far— distant past, the medium was hammers, chisels, charcoal, juice/bark for stain, and the writer’s imagination. 

Imagination of Christmas Past-Present (slightly past, for some of us, but not all…Ahem)

Since we’re talking thousands of years here, there’s not space to list every avenue of communication man has used, so I’ll just try to hit the highlights. Past-present would be before typesetting.

Papyrus? Rice paper? I’m sure the first mother to realize that papyrus scrolls made a great medium to jot down her kids’ naughty and nice list was pretty ecstatic. Do you think she did a Snoopy dance right there on top of an Egyptian pyramid?

Imagination of Christmas Present (like now!)

Let’s consider Christmas present as pretty much anything that is a viable option in this day and age, but would be considered really odd and unwieldy to use for mass production— like transferring a 95,000 word novel from Imagination to a readable format. Good old pen and ink on paper still works, but at some point somebody will have to type that story out onto something with a keyboard/keypad, which would include typewriters, computers, phones, tablets, etc.

Imagination of Christmas Future (use your imagination...if you dare!)

The medium to get stories on to paper has changed astronomically since time began: from using a finger to swipe a four-footed wildebeest onto a cave wall to pounding out a 400,000 word tome into a laptop and shooting off to the printer/ebook fairy.

Now here is where my imagination takes a hike. What does the imagination of Christmas Future look like? The concept of story has not changed in thousands of years.

Imagination is still found in that elusive far, far away place that a writer has to travel to alone, retrieve her story and bring it back. There is nothing, no pen, no paper, no stone, no chisel, no laptop, no brainwave electrode wiring that can pull it out of the brain and dump it on the page like Doppler printouts record pain thresholds.

The first bored cave child who swiped a finger smeared with charcoal across a stone wall, stared at it a second, then made four tiny little swipes and created legs—two more strokes added a head and a tail—would never, ever, ever have dreamed that today humans would be communicating with millions of people at the click of a button.

So, is it any wonder that I have a hard time believing that the Imagination of Christmas Future will include a way to create story out of thin air.

Bah Humbug!

Tell me what you think about the future of a writer's imagination? Will electrodes allow you to write stories in your sleep? Will lasers bore into your eyes and extract your story just by recording the way your eyes twinkle? Will the nerve endings in your fingers just transport your thoughts to a thought-sensitive keyboard? 

Or do you agree with Ebenezer Scrooge when he says, “Bah Humbug! Nothing regarding how story is extracted from that far, far away place will ever, ever change.”

And that, Tiny Tim, is why it is called Imagination.

A Merry Christmas to all,

and to all a good night!

My Winter E-News will be going out soon. 

Subscribers will receive the first ever 

Seeker Sampler

a collection of short stories, excerpts, and poetry

from Seekers Mary Connealy, Sandra Leesmith,

Pam Hillman, and Missy Tippens.

I just finished formatting the pdf for this Sampler,

and I can't wait to show it to you!

Go to www.pamhillman.com and sign up for E-News
and I'll email you a free pdf of the Sampler!

www.pamhillman.com