Writing Without Chains: Letting Your Imagination Run Wild

Mostly for all of us, whenever we sit down to write, or even daydream, an invisible censor sits perched on our shoulder: you can’t write that; that’s too dark; too strange; too inflammatory. But what happens if you silence that voice? When you let your imagination run wild and unfiltered, well—that’s when the real magic happens.
Creativity thrives on freedom, and yet most of us instinctively pull back upon ourselves. Afraid to be judged—afraid some person is going to read and misunderstand our words, or worse, understand them on a deeper level. Your imagination doesn’t take any interest in those fears. It doesn’t know about the concepts “playing it cool” or “playing it comfortably.” It simply is.
When I started writing Dark Matter, I made a decision: I wasn’t going to pull any punches. If a scene was unnerving, I let it be unnerving. If a character said something sharp, cruel, or raw, I let them speak without filtering their voice. Characters like Beris—who exists in the shadows and speaks with a biting wit—came alive precisely because I didn’t try to make him fit into a neat, polite box.
Beris doesn’t care about your comfort. Beris doesn’t care about your expectations. And then, he became a mirror for the creative process itself—unrepentant, wild, and honest—in that way. His loyalty shimmers, his motives flicker, but he is real because his voice was never silenced.
But that doesn’t make letting go of artistic control any easier. For every scene that poured out of me as easily as water, there were a thousand others over which I quaked with dread. What if people didn’t understand it? What if it was just too dark for readers? Those fears are normal—they are part of the process. But each and every time they settled onto my shoulder, I remembered something Stephen King said in On Writing: “Write with the door closed.“
It isn’t about writing to please all the people. It is being true to oneself. It’s about letting your imagination do the talking and trusting it will know where it is taking you.
The best stories do not come from safe predictable places, but from a messy corner of the head where the shadows whisper secrets and the wild ideas are running free. That’s where Dark Matter lives.
Take Joshua Carpenter, for instance. He is not the typical hero who oozes confidence, fearlessness, or nobility. He’s a boy tormented by questions he can’t answer and shadows that won’t leave him alone. His journey isn’t clean or easy—it’s messy, raw, full of false steps, doubts, and mistakes. But that is what makes his story real.
Isn’t it what we want from our fiction: stories that might be real, even about impossible worlds? Characters get themselves into stumbles and falls—and then get back up—just as we find ourselves doing in real life? So, my challenge to you today, whether you are a writer, an artist, or just someone who loves stories, is this: set your imagination free. Don’t filter it. Don’t censor it. Let it take you on places that you did not expect to go, even if those places are uncomfortable or strange.
That is where the magic happens. Ready for a story that lets the imagination run riot, to say the least, and have the shadows tell their version of the truth? Look no more; Dark Matter is here to say hello. Receive updates, exclusive content, and a pre-release discount by signing up below. Sign up here.