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I have learned the art of filling in your lines with your visuals and your movies and your imagination.
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject – skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it’s science fiction, horror or really anything. I’m just drawn to quality. I don’t think ‘Darkness Falls’ is horror there isn’t any gore by any stretch of the imagination.
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character’s actions or lines are truer than others.
As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.
Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.
Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.
The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.
It’s definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on ‘Star Trek,’ that came out the imagination of the writers, and the creators that are actually in the world today.
I feel very warm towards Mum and Dad for giving us the independence they did. My childhood, and the fact we didn’t have a TV, gave me a boundless imagination.