It's All There

I've been taking an improv class in San Francisco, with Doug Kassel. We're working on objects. "Objects?" you say.
Here's how a typical exercise worked. We held our hands in a shape, imagining we held some object. Then, we move our hands to different positions--it becomes dancelike after a while--and let another object appear.
It probably looks strange to a bystander. But in the experience--at least for me--it verged on hallucinatory. It wasn't as though I actually saw the objects... but then again, I did. That is, outside of their lack of actual physical form, they were there.
To any artist, I don't think this seems so strange. If you're going to do a painting, it is entirely in your imagination. Or, as Michaelangelo is alleged to have said about sculpture, the form was already present in the stone; he was only chipping away the parts that were not the sculpture.
The stone, in the case of improv, is space, of course. I heard a recent Radiolab bit about the Chicago improv artists known as TJ and Dave. They do a 50-minute-long improv, five nights a week, entirely developing the characters, the story, the themes, and everything fresh. Their idea is, like Michaelangelo's, that the people and the stories are already there. As artists, they intersect with them for this brief time (though a 50-minute improv would be HARD!) and bring it to life.
I have had this experience doing improv on occasion, and working with objects added (excuse the literalness) a new dimension to this experience. The objects are already in the space. And it isn't an intellectual experience to find them. In fact, if you start to think about it, they disappear. Improv of this sort is experiential, and more than a little mysterious. As for the objects already being in the space, it got me to thinking about Dark Matter, which composes 30-something percent of the universe. The visible universe comprises only 4 percent of the universe. Dark Matter can neither be seen, nor can it be measured outside of the effects it has on things that we can see and measure: radio waves, gravitational fields, light, etc.
So, working in space, identifying and manipulating "objects" that are found there, feels a little other-worldly, as though one has entered that realm of Dark Matter. It becomes fleetingly visible when you need it, and then it recedes into whatever dimension it resides.
What does any of this have to do with writing? Quite a lot, in fact. Of course, writing fiction begins, like all art, in the imagination. A novel begins on a blank page. Like improv, you "make it up as you go along" (thank you David Byrne for putting that phrase to music in Naive Melody) but I would argue that you don't really make it up. When I'm engaged in the process of writing, it feels more like I'm watching and listening to and feeling the emotions of the characters and just writing down what happened. On a larger scale--the scale of a novel--the whole story, the interplay of the characters, and the multitude of moving parts that make up a good and compelling story, are already there, just as the objects that one uses in improv are already there, or the form of a sculpture.