Reading this month’s excellent issue of Wired (full disclosure: I write for them and love writing for them), I stumbled across the interesting new buzz word: vook. In the world of publishing, vooks are the coming thing – books that incorporate video clips within the narrative.

Big publishers are already investigating vooks and with the speculation around the Apple Tablet and the idea of tablets as the future vehicle for all publishing from magazines to fiction, non-fiction and academic textbooks, the traditional book’s time could be numbered.

If that is the future of books, it will have big implications for our imaginations. As the world moves more and more towards constant stimulation and total visualisation, our imaginations could seriously suffer.

Films and television already show and tell us things, so we don’t have to perform a leap of imagination to understand the information they present to us. Video games are an immersive experience, their goal is to throw us into the heart of a construct created by other people’s imaginations.

The printed word, its near cousin the internet word and the radio are among the few remaining forms of human expression (besides face-to-face human conversation) that still require us to use imaginations. If we start to mesh them together with video we will start to imagine less, to become less capable of using our minds to fill in details in stories, to create our own stories. If we’re fed stories all chewed up and ready to swallow, the mashed up banana of easy fiction, our imaginations will suffer.

There is a theory that dreams were once not nearly as narrative but a far more impressionistic soup and that the growth of film and television tied our brains to a more clearly linear way of thinking. Studies showed that exposure to colour television and film increased the prevalence of people dreaming in colour.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell draws a distinction between the intelligence of people who are simply capable of acquiring and retaining information and “practical intelligence” the ability to know how to apply that knowledge effectively. Imagination is important – it’s arguably imagination that distinguishes a gifted physicist from a genius.

The genius is able to imagine something beyond the facts, to take leaps in their head, to hypothesise other solutions. If you don’t challenge and use your imagination, it becomes flabby like an unused muscle. If the world is setting up to give us more and more easy stories, there’ll be a spread of these unfit imaginations and an opportunity for “imagination athletes” to exploit.

We need more than capable engineers, scientists and business people. There’s a lot of talk about the knowledge economy and its hidden unit of currency is imagination. Without imagination there cannot be new or groundbreaking ideas, they’re fuelled by it.

If the majority of people grown lazy with fast food media, books that come with pictures and push the words into a subservient position, those people who have been trained to use their imaginations will be in a stronger position. Their attention spans will be longer, their creativity will be more pronounced.

I’m not saying that words are the only means of fostering the imagination. It’s clear that film, TV, art work, photos and more can play their part but black and white type or a voice from a speaker are the heavy weights of exercising the imagination. They force you to construct images in your mind with nothing else to support them but your own understanding of the words and their implications.

Those people who raise children who play with the box as often as the toy will produce adults with far more advantages than those who rely on stories from a vook.

“If you’d started as a journalist five years earlier, you’d probably be editor of GQ or something.”

That was the standout phrase in a killer dissection of the catalogue of mistakes I made in my first six years of trying to become A BIG SUCCESSFUL WRITER ™. On the phone to a journalist who’s still in the middle of London’s canape-strewn maze, I listened to a long list of reasons why plenty of people like me and lots of people think I’m the kind of tosser who looks best flat on their face in the rain.

My friend essentially described me barreling around London making enemies like a more hirsute, less-driven version of Toby Young. The way he delicately put it was that “having such strong opinions might not have been the best idea.”

For a good few years I had an ego so sizable that it could have emerged from my ears and formed a solid moon orbiting my head. But that’s been replaced by a pitiful little grey cloud of the sort sported by Eeyore in the less charming Disney version of Winnie The Pooh. I’ve gone from perpetually driving forward in the style of one of those disturbingly gimlet-eyed swimmers at the local pool to treading water in the shallow end wearing comically undersized water wings.

I spent my teens pouring over the NME, Melody Maker, Select and the rest, dreaming of being a lighter Lester Bang or Nick Kent without the penchant for leather trousers and smack. But when I got the chance to work for a music magazine, I screwed it up in spectacular fashion. After talking my way in like a confidence trickster with an unusually good knowledge of Nirvana, Bowie’s back catalogue and mid-80s American hardcore punk, I managed to end up banging my head on the desk and sending proofs so error-laden they may as well have been edited by Lenny from Of Mice And Men.

A hero needs a nemesis but for someone hoping that they might one day be the kind of writer who doesn’t have to consider whether buying name brand butter and not Tesco Value spread is a good idea, accumulating enmity faster than the Pope gatecrashing Peter Tatchell’s birthday bash isn’t smart.

I spotted on Facebook today that one of my university friends has reinvented herself as a writer and is winning short story competitions at a rate of knots. Meanwhile, Joe Dunthorne, who was in the same edition of the May Anthologies as I was (I was the only first year with something in there that year), is a successful novelist and screen writer with a film on the way – directed by Richard Ayoade and soundtracked by Alex Turner.

At the party after the publication of that May Anthologies, where I could have spoken to a major London agent, I got drunk and stood in the corner silently loathing people wearing better shoes than me. I bounced around writing reviews for the university newspapers and doing dreadful stand up on bills with comics who are now storming Edinburgh and popping up on TV with a regularity that makes me want to kick in the screen like a lorry driver incensed by The Sex Pistols.

When I abruptly left my second stint at Stuff after writing for Wired and being suspended for doing so, I thought that would be a new direction. But after contributing two well-received features on The Impossible Project and Kodak, I got mired in a piece on UAVs and BAE Systems that ended up grounded after an identically-themed whizzbang extravaganza popped up in The Sunday Times.

In a five years, I went from Pensions World to Stuff to Q to Stuff to freelancing for Wired, Electricpig (which I still write for practically every day) and a lots of other exciting places. Then it just seemed to unravel.

After being nothing but condensed confidence and drive, I just fizzled out and am now off in the Siberian salt mines of journalism, writing about technology I can’t afford and mumbling bitterly about creating a brilliant column or amazing feature without doing it.

As I wrote in my last bit of confessional wailing (Cheryl Cole is 27), you can’t become a success by just sitting around and waiting for opportunities to be posted to you like invites to Hogwarts.

The trouble is I’ve got the fear. I’m a wire walker who’s stopped just looking at the next step in front of him and started staring right at the gaping abyss. And there’s a fairly substantial legion of folk with peashooters in hand ready to knock me off my balance.

In the spirit of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, what would you do next ever-reasonable-never-insane-Internet folk? Your options are a) commission Mic to write something b) retweet this column c) leave an inspiring/irritated comment.