“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.”
From The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (Chapter 9)
I came across this quotation today and was struck by it. Do you think of imagination as invention, or as understanding?
I think it’s right to think imagination more as perception – we create by coming to understand some rules of the road, and then applying those rules to our task at hand.