I have always felt that I do my best thinking while I am writing. First comes the initial insight (and perhaps this is the best part of the thought, in one sense, but read on). Then, when it comes time to write that insight down, I discover that the insight is something more like an outsight, in the sense that when I try to frame it in words, I realize that in order to do so, something about my previous set of assumptions, my previous world, has to change. I have to go outside/beyond where I am when I start the writing process. And suddenly I find myself off and running, in an unexpected direction, in fact, a direction that I didn’t even know existed.
Does anyone else experience it like this?
Here’s an article apropos to this post on the subject of writing entitled: ‘John Berger: ‘Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper’. I particularly liked this quote as the author was describing translation from one language to another…
“True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing†and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the “thing†that is waiting to be articulated.â€
Recommend reading the whole article. Good read!
Writing is evidence of a moment – an intersection of imagined self and fictional reality. Like whipping cream, it entrains space into a fluid saturated with the lipids of habit and convention. That expansion allows new forms, but it’s still cream.
Creative writing, specifically my poetry, puts me in the zone…it is very relaxing for me yet exciting and filled with energy at the same time…it is when thinking comes naturally and the words flow in harmony with the thoughts so that nothing is forced…and, everything rhymes…lol…
Writing my essays on TSK is more challanging, and in the beginning was even frustrating for me, but it is getting easier now. Keeping the journal is very helpful in forming the essays. I am surprised at how spontaneous the writing is, even when it is though about…if that makes any sense to anyone…
~tlc
Hi Michael,
I think you make my point very well. When I said, “While I busied myself with the work of contextualizing meaning”, that is when I depend on the past, on memory, as you say I,”play the role of that generous listener — more interested in the beauty and truth”, of my memory of the open insight (which is not the opening anymore). And as you convey, “Being the one who is trying to express it” — being the open source, ‘is’ continuous renewing.
Best wishes, David
How exciting to stumble upon a three-year-long diagogue about how conducting insight and vision into speech can sometimes enliven the insight (and sometimes lead it astray). I still remember times in my life when the genuine interest of a listener would awaken a part of me that was ordinarily hidden in the life I was living. I wonder if in the creative process, of seeking to express an insight or feeling, we don’t play the role of that generous listener–more interested in the beauty and truth that has visited us than in being the one who is trying to express it.
Michael
Hi Jack,
I returned to this page and reconsidered what I said almost three years ago, particularly in light of a recently completed 27 week TSK class. We inquired into space, stories and self, and conducting time and knowledge, and we discovered that we could reorient our conventional perspective of the self by going “directly to the point of arising itself: the point in each experience where the future could be said to come into being.” DTS p.99
During the course I did a lot of writing and found it a perfect opportunity to observe how I continually approached this point, the ‘future infinitive’, as I compose. While I busied myself with the work of contextualizing meaning, that activity seemed to suspend itself at this ‘edge’, or open source where the new and not yet embodied seemed to emerge. It was from this openness that the contextualizing took its direction and heading. In this way, writing was a continuously renewing, creative process.
Regards,
David
Hi Linda,
I don’t look so much to the felt sense, although there are times when that comes to my attention, and then there definitely a kind of spaciousness, that seems global.
I think the joyful quality is important. Something creative is happening, and you get to go along for the ride.
I think when this happens, writing/thinking become meditative. I wonder if it would be possible to do more with this as a specific practice.
I suppose people sometimes try an approach like this for creative writing. And in the sense I mean, all writing is creative. But I specifically do not mean ‘creative writing’ as the term is usually used.
Jack
My sense is a little different and the same. Initial insight is kind of feeling in the space of my head, open space. how it has feeling I don’t know but that is what it is like. Then when that space gives over its sense ( not logic but sense of feeling like), poetry does seem the way to convey without getting limited by linear construct. As I reflect, the open feeling where the communication arises is like from very open space in the ears. Don’t know why the ears. But with open ears, the throat is encouraged. Works, or words, come to the paper like steady and calm joy. Rather than limitation, the search for words feels more open as landing on the right one or combination is like seeing an old friend again. It draws one on.
Linda
Nice…
Poems seem to start like that, an impulse laid down in words…and then what? Eventually more words are the “what, but that might take a whole lot of drafts, winds beating through an open window. Catch one and let it speak, sail if you will, and the keyboard is found in some quartet playing in some club/ somewhere, but one is home and playing, and it seems right,the chords close it and the heart opens in some minor key way.
And i agree with both of you. The original flash is a mystery. And letting it evolve over time, in the belly, as it were, goes on whether we are aware of it or not. But Joel’s description echoes mine.
I’m delighted people read this area; it may encourage me to write more.
I find both Jack’s and David’s descriptions apply to my experience. The original insight often comes as a flash of imagining, a sense of possibility, that is accompanied by great clarity and openness. But the thought is still inchoate, incomplete, and germinal. I sense, with some excitement, that there’s something more that will be revealed on closer examination. It is this anticipation that prompts and fuels the experiment of writing. Then, in the process of formulation, new vistas and unexpected possibilities reveal themselves. I often have the sense that I don’t know what I think until I write it,
Joel
Hi Jack,
Actually, I’ve always felt I do my best composing in my head, an activity I do best over time, not that I’m that great at it. :-) When I do this, it allows my heartfelt intent to call forth aspects from depths that discursive thinking usually skims over. When an insight seems to ‘dawn’ on me, it is usually associated with an inquiry I’ve been considering. In that dawning there is great clarity and openness. If I decide to write it down, I must contextualize it, and that begins the series of choices and decisions that narrow and particularize how to approach what I want to say, as well as the manner in which I think will best express the meaning of that insight. The great challenge in particularizing any open insight is to try and maintain as much of the openness and clarity of its original dawning.
Regards,
David