In a series of forty-five short essays that constitute his book translated into English under the title “Damn the Novel: When a Privileged Genre Prevails Over All Forms of Creative Writing,” Sudanese-born poet and essayist Amr Muneer Dahab denounces the privilege granted to the novel, the literary genre that is treated by publishers—and viewed by the public—as superior to all others and is virtually guaranteed marketability and profitability, to the detriment of others.

In this series of posts, the prolific author shares excerpts from the book.

This week: Chapter 18: The Unholy Fantasy

It is unwise, and even illogical, to underestimate the (huge) impact of imagination in the novel and literature in general. The novel’s prevail has been fundamentally due to the use of fantasy. Similarly, the other (literary) genres derive, in one way or another, their charm and grace from embracing the perspectives of imagination. Nevertheless, the reverence of imagination on the part of novel devotees (novelists and readers alike) must be undermined and refuted.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez reacted to the matter when he said “it always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” The words of the Colombian novelist denote that imagination has a concrete (not an ethereal) connection to reality. In truth, real life is not only a source from which creators/artists extract the nectar of their creativity, but it is also the reservoir that keeps fueling them whenever they run out of inspiration and insight.

To be fair, we should confess that there exists a reciprocal exchange between imagination and reality. Reality provides imagination with the indispensable fuel for the takeoff. Some of the fruits of imagination grow to become parts of real life enriching the already existing truths. Thus, considerable phases of reality have resulted from the accumulation of what used to be merely pure fantasy throughout periods of the past.

Accordingly, narrative fiction, along with the other creative writing forms, is guilty when it considers that imagination is so holy that any piece of writing is not even part of literature if not established in imagination. Besides, it is unfair to question the aesthetic quality of a literary work according to the degree to which fantasy occupies the work. Imagination is not the only tool to guarantee originality and creativity; there are many literary ingredients that can help beget exceptional writing without having to be at the mercy of the demands of fantasy.

At this point, we are hard-pressed to come up with a clear definition of imagination. This mission will be even harder when we realize that there is not only one sort of imagination, but many. The uneasiness then will be laid in differentiating between the contrastive notions about imagination across the impassable path leading to a comprehensive and definite definition whose basic utility is to briefly refer to the phenomenon whenever it is necessary.

More importantly, we will discover the unique relationship between imagination and creativity, which most of people confusingly consider to be synonymous. To distinguish between the two dictums, we can say that it is possible to come across an original creativity not only without excessive imagination but without any imagination at all. Here I am not going to cite great critical and intellectual works as illustration of creativity but rather literary pieces of work based on creative ideas and completely realistic methods of expression.

If imagination stands for tackling what hasn’t been approached yet, it can be then considered as the other side of the same coin of creativity. However, it is most of the time referred to as what can’t be concretized (on the ground of real life), while it is widely agreed upon that creativity is that masterpiece (in whatever genre) flourishingly coming to life after having been nothing but an abstract notion.

Even though he had underestimated the value of mental effort to produce marvelous work without basically relying on imagination, the words of Sebastian Junger in Why We Write confirm that the creation of an appealing work does not necessarily mean following in the steps of imagination in total subservience: “My writing does not belong to narrative literature. So I don’t need to brainstorm my mind to produce new ideas. My best ideas come from the world. I reap them but I don’t need to create them. All that I have to do is taking things that I saw, things that people told me, and things I looked for myself, the making of the world. Then I transform them into a concatenation of words that people would like to read. Writing, this wonderful alchemy, magic-like will be read if you do it the right way.”

Junger’s job as a journalist, a war correspondent, helps him see that the needed “brainstorming” to produce unliterary writing is much easier than anything else. Even though the value of a literary work should not be assessed in relation to the required mental effort, but with the dexterity that manifests in its writing process, original intellectual creativity (even in the non-narrative work) usually needs tremendous mental activity. The core issue is not necessarily about the purpose behind imagination as commonly dealt with, but about the unique and original creation/invention of some like-no-other literary (or any creative) piece of work.

The most important part of Sebastian Junger’s contribution in the above-mentioned book concerning the relationship between imagination and reality is best conveyed when he says: “In journalism there is a separating line between imagination and reality. I feel that I have to hold to it. As a journalist you can’t imagine a scene or a conversation. While in the middle of writing The Perfect Storm, I faced a dreadful critical situation. I was writing about a boat that disappeared, but I lost the thread when the boat left the coast. What to say about a boat that sank, where did it happen? What would people be saying to each other? What would death be like on a boat drowned by a storm? It seemed as if I had a deep hole in the midst of the narration process. I couldn’t fill the missing part resorting to imagination.”

That hole in the narration, as Junger described it, was supposed to be a factor for other writers to unlimitedly embrace the seductive bells of imagination. But Sebastian simply and daringly faced his inability to imagine. It was not the end of the world for weaving a marvelous book: “I took all my writing experience from reading good works by other writers including Thomas, Wolf, Peter Matheson, John McPhee, and Richard Preston. The latter also faced the same problem in The Hot Zone. His main character died resulting in holes in the plot line which were filled with suppositions. He told the reader: “we don’t know. Perhaps he (the main character) said this, perhaps he did that. We know that his temperature was 41°C (105.8°F). That’s why he felt this.’ ”

Junger went on proving his bravery and simplicity in facing his impotency in relation to imagination: “I realized that I could suggest realistically possible scenarios to my readers without lying (a precise expression of imagination!) as long as I am honest about mere possibilities that we take into account, keeping it within the range of journalism. So, I found other boats that survived the storm and I listened to their calls through the radio. I could have said: ‘We don’t know what happened to the boat of my fellows, but we know what happened to another boat. I met a person whose boat capsized in heavy seas. He found his lungs full of air in a sinking boat. Based on this incident, he told me about what he thought had happened to the crew of the Andrea Gail. This is how I managed to narrate it to the readers. I filled the gaps utilizing logic, not fantasy. Thus responding to this (critical) issue was very exciting for me.”

As plainly clear above, all that Sebastian Junger did was submit to the truth (advice?) of Gabriel Garcia Marquez suggesting that every imagination has got a basis that links it to reality (life). However, instead of departing from reality to imagination, as Garcia Marquez advocated, Junger came back from what was supposed to make him soar to the extreme heights of imagination to pleasantly seek warmth in the lap of reality—the outcome being a renowned piece of work on the top of the bestselling list. To conclude, the most important lesson we can deduce from this, disregarding the experience of Sebastian Junger in specific, is that delicate writing worthy of being described as a creative piece of art is accomplishable either through primarily counting on imagination or on the pure truths about life as well.