J.K. Rowling, in her recent Harvard commencement address, details what she considers to be the true power of imagination when it comes to storytelling.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

A key component to delivering that resonating experience is creating a story that is meaningful - a story that has a purpose for its existence.

And for anyone who has found rejection at the end of several months of heartfelt writing (yours truly included), I give the following:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

The video and complete transcript of her address (which contains much more than inspiring advice for would-be writers) can be found here.

(via kottke)

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