Image and Imagination

"A man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing"

-C. S. Lewis

Before writing the Narnian novels and other fictional books, C. S. Lewis only saw pictures in his head. There was no story. For about twenty four years he did nothing about the image of Tumnus (the Faun) carrying an umbrella and a parcel, but the image still remained in his head. The surprising thing is that although C. S. Lewis claims that he does not know how he wrote the story, he still remembers the exact image that started the whole idea of the Narnian novels. I think the idea here isn't just about image, but also about Imagination. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the first definition of Imagination is: The act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.
Even though C. S. Lewis didn't try to make up an image of Tumnus, he processed it at the age of around forty years when it was in his head and eventually turned it into a story. I think Imagination follows Image. C. S. Lewis doesn't mention this, but I believe that he must have contemplated a lot on the image of the Faun and the significance of the Parcel and the Umbrella in his hands. I learnt two things from this excerpt. First, that Imagination follows the Image. And second, the story may not stay in our minds forever and we may forget how we came up with the concept and the storyline, but images stay in our heads for a long time, some till the day we die.