One of the benefits I have enjoyed most when entering this exciting world of reading is the development of creativity and imagination . And I’m not just talking about fiction books. Every book that comes into your hands, once you open it and start enjoying it, you can already get great lessons and teachings from it. Reading has psychological, physical, intellectual, and even spiritual benefits. It is a wonderful habit that is worth cultivating no matter how old you are. Once you get into it and enjoy it, you will never want to put a book down again.
Creativity and reading
Books have given me the creativity to solve everyday problems, at home and in business. Creativity to face the obstacles that come my way and imagination to develop new interpersonal relationships. When setting goals and dreaming in somewhat turbulent environments. Whatever book you decide to start with or the one you are already reading, I recommend that you do not go through it quickly as if you wanted to devour it and cram all that information into your head. Delight in every word, imagine that you are the protagonist of that story, if you connect with any character, let yourself be seduced. When I started my relationship with books one of the first things I had to unlearn was the taboo of marking them. I must confess that it wasn’t hard for me, ecause I always saw my mother marking them or making notes on them. I recommend that you break that paradigm and when you’re reading a book, underline everything that catches your attention, with a pencil, pen, or highlighter, but do it, you’ll be telling the book that that part stole your heart.
Between stories and novels
When we read a technical, marketing, financial, or accounting book, it is easier to understand what I am saying. But in this case,e I am going to refer to narrative (novels and short stories) which is one of my favorite genres. When I read a story, for example, I start to imagine that I am the protagonist and I start to analyze how this person was able to solve his problem and what message that story brings me to apply to my life. There are indeed tragic stories like Stephen King’s The Survivor, but that is where my creativity and imagination kick in and I start to think about what this story brings me. I even investigate a little beyond the story and can find wonderful information about the author or the reason for this story. In a simpler case, when I read Cuentos de la Selva by Horacio Quiroga in each of those stories the author makes the moral clearer. However, the imagination is activated when they put together a whole story around a talking parrot. Yes, they are stories for children, he wrote them for his children, and with this book I became a child again.
An exercise for creativity
I’m going to share an exercise that I like to do to increase my creativity and imagination when reading. It’s simple: changing the ending of the story. We’re not always satisfied with the ending, even with great authors, so why not change the story? Think about how you would have liked it to end, what would have happened to the main character, what other characters you would include, and then let your imagination run wild. When I read novels, a whole world of possibilities opens up for me and I feel like I’m traveling around the world and getting to know a lot of different cultures through those letters.
A tour of my favorites
One of the first novels I read was The Sum of Days y Isabel Allende an autobiographical novel that tells you about history, love, heartbreak, life, and death from the author’s perspective. I became so immersed in the novel that when I finished it I started to write my diary and I decided to dedicate myself to writing. Another book that marked a before and after in my life was Man’s Search for Meaning by iViktorFrankl. It is a philosophical novel that helps you see life from another perspective through the author’s experience. Another novel that developed my creativity in terms of interpersonal relationships was Love in the Time of Choler by Gabriel García Márquez. With this novel, I f el l in lLove Again a story set in another time that leaves you with a message of true love. Each of you will have your own experiences with books you’ve started or when you finish a read one and it leaves you with the feeling that the next one won’t fill the void. Yes, that was a bit dramatic, but it’s a bit of what I feel when I finish a good story or a good novel. To enjoy and take advantage of those flashes of creativity that reading triggers in you, always have a notebook on hand. Don’t let those ideas go away, write them down.