There is always an origin to writing something (or aptly, a citation.)
"I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The interesting part about this quote is not the quote itself, which is blatantly false but feels good (how would it sound: "I cannot remember the tiktoks/tv series/comic books I have watched/read...: even so, they have made me"), but how much we succumb to authority.
If the patron of the local pub had delivered the quote in question, we would tell him to put down his tenth beer. But since it was said by an intellectual, who has nothing more to say on the matter than the patron mentioned above could say, we take it at face value.
I get it but really, we eat food to retain its nutrients while we read books to retain knowledge(sometimes).
Do we? As examined in The Little Prince, people can get nutritions from pills and powders, factually humanity has made a culture out of food, much more than just getting nutritious
Thank God, i have company. I used to think I had early onset dementia.
> More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of Several Short Sentences About Writing, calls these “volunteer sentences.” You don’t follow them, you tame them. Take control of your writing.
Love it. I also really enjoyed the book "First You Write a Sentence" by Joe Moran
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607260/first-you-wr...
Thanks for sharing. That was my favorite piece of reading in a while.
This is a common experience for writers, the sense of sentences appearing or almost completing themselves...it just occurred to me that reminds me of something that is asserted by Julian Jaynes in his controversial "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." He claims that prior to the Bronze Age, human beings did not recognize their thoughts as belonging or originating with themselves; instead, they perceived thoughts as emanating externally, from Gods. I have no idea if there are merits to Jaynes theory, but it's fun to consider if the writer's inner voice, this sense of automaticity while writing, might recruit the same mechanisms of which Jaynes is speaking.
Where else could language really come from besides appearing more or less spontaneously in the mind? All thought is like this.
Is there a level of consciousness prior to language that willfully assembles the next word out of more subtle mind stuff? There would be an infinite regress here.
Exactly. In order to say a thought *wasn’t spontaneous* would mean that you thought something BEFORE you thought it.
You could even go further -- all actions are spontaneous...life is spontaneous.
Interestingly, it was this line of thinking that once upon a time led to the rejection of the idea of free will: a thought is caused by another, and that by another yet, and so on, so there is no free thought or deliberation.
From that perspective, it was mentioned in this Russell Ackoff talk that recently emerged on HN: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGN5DBpW93g
I agree. In different traditions, it's this realization that there is no separate assembler of thoughts/words (to your point, the problem of who is the assembler of the assembler?) that is a key insight.
Writing is an interesting process, it seems different for everyone. There are lots of tools and techniques so that is not a surprise. For me sometimes it's putting together LEGOs, other times it's crafting a puzzle or panning for gold. And a rare few times its felt like hooking into the great creative currents of the universe to bring something to fruition.
As a beginner in fiction writing, it is really interesting to hear from various writers I admire how different their processes are how every single one, without fail, emphasizes that it’s deeply personal and to develop your own style.
I guess this comment proves my style is run on sentences :)
Well said
I find the process of writing standup comedy to be the purest form of writing and public speaking. There is a constant effort to adjust words around in order to get that extra laugh. How you write something has direct effect on how the joke is told. Specially sensitive subjects. If you ever want to expand your writing skills I suggest learning how to write a standup joke. It works really well. More so if you have a sense of humor.
> It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started
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What a terrible article. Honestly - I'm glad I won't be able to read another
Both art and article are good. I can definitely relate. I feel like most of my writing actually happens well before I sit down to write anything. It’s thoughts and notes, then something comes out. The weirdly frustrating thing is when it doesn’t align with my notes at all, but somehow it’s better. Or at least I think it’s better. Then it’s a matter of not editing too much. Or at all sometimes. I’ve definitely written and posted things that when from brain to web.
yes!
typing is not writing
for me at least 90% of the "writing" happens away from a keyboard
mainly in my head (on walks, in the shower, when I least expect it)
then on paper & pencil, writing words, phrases, drawing lines, rinse, repeat
my goal is to finish the conceptual thinking to a degree that when I sit down in front of a keyboard, it's mainly "downloading" from my brain
If I try to do the conceptual work at a keyboard it's torture
Interesting. When I'm on a walk or in the shower, I try to avoid thinking about anything complicated, preferring to wait till I'm in front of a keyboard.
In meditation, instead of the breath you can use your thoughts as an object to observe dispassionately. I believe we all have what this author is describing, basically language based thought that we have no seeming conscious control over (I would argue all of our thoughts). We can just sit back and watch the show. My sense is that some people see this more readily than others and are more sensitive to it, probably good correlation with different types of artists. For me personally, it took a while to see this for the first time, but it was a revelation and completely changes your perspective on what/who you think you are.
In a lucid dream you know you are dreaming. Recently I discovered that just because I am aware that I am in a dream and my actions do not not have real consequences, the feelings connected to the actions in my dream remain real. In my dreams, and awake.
Weird.
“ There remains a strange relation to the poems I have already written. Though they were written to create or affirm my existence, they did not, once they were finished, continue to do so. What they suggested, when I read them afterward, was that I had once existed and had thoughts; something that had been alive and specific was now silent or vanished. So the poems became a kind of chastisement, taunting reminders of what was not.”
Looking back on previous writing can also be a positive reinforcement, though yeah sometimes you feel taunted, or that you could’ve done better. And small though it may feel, writing is action. You didn’t just let thing bounce around in your head, you wrote it out - you did something. My hot take on this this morning - I liked this read, thanks for posting.
I cannot find the source, but I saved this quote by Douglas Hofstadter about the process of writing, rewriting, and revising:
"It is the intensity of this process of global tightening and smoothing of a huge structure that was once implicit in one's mind but is now external and has its own unanticipated shape, life, and momentum, it is the power of this process of converting a set of once-intangible intuitions into a very tangible network of interconnected crystals, that I had forgotten."
Coming across stuff like this is why I value the hacker news community.
An extreme version is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing
You can get some pretty far-out places doing this on an electronic typewriter, in the dark, with the right state of mind.
Example: https://bedaring.org/post/quarantined-thoughts/the-pursuit-o....
Thank you very much for posting this.