The Dogged Determination of Imagination: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

 Completing a novel, or any long, complex work, requires a dogged determination. You write draft after draft over months and years. Sometimes you feel like it will never be done. Often there is a final push to the finish. Polish! Polish that red apple! For months you focus, work, ignore all the shiny distractions—what about this poem? That new idea? That essay, book, trip, social event? Many days, you doubt the book will ever be done. Toward the end of the polish process, this can feel like the eighth month of pregnancy—

 That’s where I am in my current book—and I haven't even started labor pains yet.

For me, imagination is a co-partner with determination. I don’t mean imagining my completed, printed book or manuscript in my hand or on a bookshelf (although I know this helps some people). What helps me to keep working is imagining my book becoming its own luminous self, existing in the world independently of me—like a cluster of candles, that in the aggregate, will cast its own unique light. Something born. When my imagination can picture that, hold that thought, my determination is renewed.

 OK, back to work.