Writing as Transformation

Thank God, i have company. I used to think I had early onset dementia.

I get it but really, we eat food to retain its nutrients while we read books to retain knowledge(sometimes).

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.

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.

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...

Well said

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 :)

That's a good summary. It's worth pointing out that there's technical writing and literary writing. They are related but different enough that it's worth calling out the difference.

Technical writing is a skill you can learn. If you have somebody pointing out what you are doing wrong structurally, you can learn to do it right every time. I had a Ph. D. supervisor who taught me that little life hack thirty years ago. I was a bit depressed with my lack of progress when he pointed out just four or five things that I was doing wrong a lot. So, I fixed those things and it got better and developed the skill of spotting my own mistakes.

The whole process took something like six months or so to get to acceptable levels (by review committees for conferences and workshops). Learning to communicate is a big part of the process of getting a Ph. D. A master degree won't quite get you there (depending on the field). Especially computer scientists seem to have a few blind spots for this. Anyway, if you can't talk about your findings in a coherent way, nobody is going to bother listening to you.

Literary writing is more free form. Technical writing skills are merely the starting point for that. But it's like any art form where somebody that has mastered rules and skills start bending the rules in intentional ways; or even change them. Some authors I like make that look easy to the point where I wonder whether I could do that. But doing that well is not easy.

And there's also the notion that it's not just about the style and form but about the content. After a life of ignorance about Greek mythology, I read Stephen Fry's Mythos over the summer. His writing is wonderful. But it also drove home the point of how ignorant I was of Greek myths influencing basically every popular movie or book I've ever liked. I like the Matrix, for example. There's a reason Morpheus is called Morpheus (Greek god of dreams) and that whole business with the blue and red pills relates to that. That whole movie is dripping with Greek mythology references and it's not like they were subtle about it. I kind of knew of course.

Movies and books don't just come out of nowhere. They are variations of stories that have been told and retold over and over again by countless people for thousands of years. And the better authors tend to know their mythology, philosophy, work by their modern peers, etc. Learning to write involves a lot of reading so you can refer to that and be original and intentional.

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

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.

Yeah, the first sentence could have been shorted to just "All my life I wanted to write." The editor should have pruned this. The virality and popularity of this article goes to show how all those writing guides about being concise or clear are overrated. The marketplace evidently rewards verbosity.

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....