Published on September 14, 2024 7:02 PM GMT
I’m an agnostic, on my most curmudgeonly days an atheist, but there’s something spiritual about writing. And I like writing. I can only describe being a writer as someone who expresses the landscape of their inner world while making contact with the landscape of the outer world. Mystical, freaky, and semi-creepy—right?
The best writing is unpredictable. As I write this sentence, and as you read it, it’s ever becoming what it is, its meaning ever emerging from the process of its being written. If it sounds as if my writing has no plan, it’s because you’re right. Serendipity steers my mind and keyboard and pen—and frankly my life—into unknown territory, largely by the seat of my pants. The best sentence structure is unpredictable: it teeters, some words and phrases sidestepping the reader’s and my own forecasts of how the sentence will develop. Some writing is formulaic—our educational institutions have unfortunately inculcated “convention” into its pupils—but the best embraces the stochasticity of the mind that produces it.
What’s remarkable is that despite the feelings of fortuity and unpredictability that an author has when writing, the words, sentences, paragraphs, and whole works that emerge seem intentional and predictable post hoc. Moments that seemed to have teetered mid-sentence, when the author was intuiting where their mind would pilot their pen’s next move, appear after the fact less functions of erratic mental oscillations than entailments of calculated logic. The magic of how the words appear on the page disappears if we only care for the finished product, the words on the page, not the process which brings them into being.
Reminder of the thesis at hand: this process is mystical, freaky, and semi-creepy. When one writes they must predictively read minds: when one writes, they must understand the possible combinations of neural states, and therefore thoughts and emotions and moods and memories, their writing might evoke in their audience after it enters their eyeballs. The story of what occurs when we write becomes more mysterious when we consider that the author intends to convey something to their reader, and hence evoke something in their mind, but that this something, I’ll remind you, originates from a mind, the author’s, which itself less so operates on intention than serendipity at the time of writing that something. To further puzzle ourselves, there usually exists a moment of recognition by the author after they write that what they wrote was what they really meant to write. Freaky and semi-creepy—right?
Our minds should reel when we think of this bizarre quality of the writing process because it suggests what might be key to the craft. We might me seduced to think that if an author means to convey something but doesn’t necessarily know what they mean to convey at the time of writing, yet somehow recognizes it after the fact, then there must be a source from which they draw inspiration that isn’t themselves. But, we might further ask, don’t the words emanate from the author’s fingers and brain? If they’re not the source of the words, then who, or what, is?
It's now where the strange lapses into the borderline paranormal. My intuition is that writing, or good writing at least, is as much an act of the author reading other minds as it is them reading their own. When a writer writes, they engage in an exercise of communication with themselves. More specifically and spookily (and psychoanalytically), they detect, restore, and amplify signals that their subliminal inner self offers up to their aware outer self. The better a writer becomes at communication with themselves, the clearer the signal they convey in their writing, and the clearer the signal their readers can detect when digesting their work. Better self-mind reading results in better mind offering to others. The pen becomes the transmitter, eyeballs receivers, and writing is rendered an exercise in signal processing. If done authentically, this act of writing à la signal processing ensures that the landscape of the author’s internal world makes meaningful contact with the landscape of the reader’s own internal world.
The only thing freakier than a writer having to telepathically commune with their subliminal inner self is a writer knowing exactly what that subliminal inner self has to say, now and in the future. What’s creepier than unpredictability in the writing process is predictability. What’s downright weird and horrifying is knowing the whole story before it’s written. Without the seeming emergence of that something we mean to convey when we write, we become less human and more machine, less nonlinear beings and more determined automata.
There’s a moral wanting to emerge from the lesson writing teaches us, and it’s about our lives. If you lose your sense of serendipity, of fortuity, of the equal amounts of fright and liberation that’s brought about by the perception that anything can happen at this very moment—if you can predict with full certainty the next chapter of your life’s story—are you really the author of it? Or are you a character in someone else’s story?
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