“I don’t know you how do it” is a pretty common refrain when hearing about someone running a marathon, writing computer code, or making art.
“Yes, you do!” I often want to scream. The runner spends hours training, the coder hours learning, and the artist hours practicing. There are very few skills humans are born with. We have to learn them. Suggesting otherwise is to disregard the effort someone has put into something.
Imagination is exactly the same. “I’m not creative enough to write a story.” Neither was Gaiman, until he put a bit of effort in. No one is born with thoroughly unique ideas and no one sits around waiting for a muse.
Imagination is an active process that works of the fuel you’ve been collecting for years: books, music, TV. Almost every piece of popular culture is built on top of a predecessor’s work. Munched own by one author to be mulled over and reshaped by the next.
The writing advice of “always be reading” isn’t to improve your vocabulary (that does help, but you may want to turn to crosswords for that!), it’s to fill you up with ideas you can take and work with.
Not wholesale stealing – I believe the industry frowns upon that. But you largely have free reign with the ingredients of stories; if stealing from one place is bad, stealing a tiny bit from lots of places is industry standard!
“It’s Sherlock Holmes, but if Sherlock was a house elf, and he’s trying to track down some keys, like from Locke and Key, but instead of keys they’re dog collars from Infernal Soldiers.”
All ideas stolen from books I’ve read recently, but altogether make a unique premise. Is that imaginative? There’s nothing inspired about it in there – it’s a collection of stolen ideas. But their combination will connect ideas no one has every had before. The twine that connects those threads will make a whole world out of nothing, and the story you tell will come sort of naturally out of that. You’ll have to explain the Infernal Soldiers for one thing, and the relationship between your-version-of-the-house-elves and the rest of society. You’ll have to figure out why the main character is interested in their left over collars – if nothing jumps out at you pick the obvious and see where it takes you. “Well, because he lost them.”
A fantastic and seemingly endless (and public domain!) well spring of ideas to fill up on are folklore stories.
I’m reading an indie published book, Myth & Lore: Cryptids of the UK, which is full of ancient and Weird creatures. These creatures are so mysterious that there’s often large white pieces of canvas around them which need to be filled in with stories. Rarely, for instance, are the motivations of the Loch Ness considered. Lets accept that there is a huge dino swimming around the Scottish lakes, but then the question is why was this singular creature placed there?
Take the macguffin from the last book you read or film you recently saw. Chuck that at the bottom of the loch and suddenly Nessy is there to protect that! That’s a story (or at the very least a side quest)!
That’s what imagination often is. The fun of combining ideas, jumbling them about to see how they play together, and then hopefully their summation ends up inspired.