Thoroughly Conscious Ignorance

"Science becomes a series of elegant puzzles and puzzles within puzzles—and who doesn’t like puzzles?"
This is absolutely right. The thrill of contemplating everything we can learn. Yes, I love to learn what is known, but it inspires me to realize that everything we learn means there's more to explore.

Or, to quote a less 'technical' source, "The world is so full of a number of things / I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." 

From Scientific American, "What Science Wants to Know"

How to Die?

This article is about two deaths. Two men, both artists, and how they faced early death.

One in dissolution and despair. One in awareness and creation.

Isn't this article really about how to live?

NPR's Krulwich Wonders

Writing, Bacteria, Evolution, and Rules

I wasn't sure which blog to post this article to. It is science, yes, but it is also philosophy, and very little thought was required to turn that philosophy into writing advice. So, writing, philosophy, and science? Sounds like it belongs right here.


How Life Arose on Earth, and How a Singularity Might Bring It Down
 By George Musser
from Scientific American   September 23, 2011


The origins of life; the process of evolution; the dangers of too rapid growth, but also of stagnation.

Can you see the application to writing?

There is a quote early on, from Sean Carroll. He blogs at Cosmic Variance.

“The purpose of life,” meeting co-organizer and Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll said in his opening remarks, “is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.”

Well, that's a downer for all of us who want to believe there's something inherently unique and purposeful about humanity. But as a writer, I see that as a call to remember the true purpose of my work: to write stories.

Writers are not marketing machines; we are not  role-models; we are not advocates for this, that, or anything. Of course, these are aspects of our work, but they are tangential, not essential to what we do. Writers tell stories. In non-fiction, writers provide information.

That's it. That is our whole reason to be. To write. Anything else is the proverbial icing on the cake. Don't get so caught up in the add-ons that you lose sight of your true purpose. Just tell stories.

Back to the article. Inorganic reactions become biological reactions.The evolution of life-forms was driven by the spontaneous generation of complexity.

In writing, we start with a few tools. Words. Sentences. Grammar. Themes that determine how we arrange those elements. Then we reach a critical level, and the ideas take over, dictating the words, forcing the patterns into new lines.

Some people say their characters take over the story and they can no longer tell them what to do. Such willfulness is analogous to the emergence of biological reactions in evolution. What these writers are saying is that the story has found its life. It has evolved from connected words to an entity with a need to grow and develop.

Just as there are millions upon millions of life forms in the past, present, and future of our world, so too are there millions of stories. Like life, they rely on a few basic structures, but also like life, the pressures of their environment, the resources they have, the stimuli they perceive will alter and adapt them in to myriad forms.

Nothing new under the sun? Quite correct. It is not new, it is the history of life and of literature to constantly create new permutations, new adaptations. Infinite variety.

The article goes on to discuss how a strain of bacterium discovered they could use the citrate in their agar, rather than depend upon the glucose. This evolutionary adaptation proved repeatable. (I loved the comment, "Sympathetic murmurs of pity for the grad students spread through the FQXi audience." Grad students do all the long, tedious slog-work essential for science) It's not just making stuff up, folks. It's an incredible amount of painstaking, repetitious labor that leads to science. That's why we don't call it science unless it can be proven and repeated. Not at all the same thing as merely wanting it to be true.

In writing, the old patterns work. We are taught how to craft a sentence, how to develop a character, how to 'show-don't-tell.' But if we read, we discover that the greatest writers break the rules and enhance, even throw out the accepted forms. They bring new ways of telling stories into the world. Innovation drives literature as surely as it drives life.

Many, perhaps most innovations will fail. But a few succeed. Don't be afraid to try new styles, new characters. Never let yourself fall into believing that there's a one-and-only way to write. That said, like the bacteria in the experiment, there's a reason why we are taught rules. They work. If you innovate, you may fail. Be warned.

The end of the article discusses how different systems follow similar patterns. Bacteria, cities, humanity: all follow predictable relations. Smaller organisms have faster metabolisms. People in cities walk faster. And short stories require tighter, more urgent pacing.

Complexity theorist. Now there's a job title I'd love to have. "Complexity theorist Raissa D’Souza of U.C. Davis argued in her talk that when you have coupled complex systems, any break in the growth trends tends to be accompanied by wild fluctuations. Modern society is predicated on growth; stability is tantamount to collapse."

I've long wondered why humans in western cultures are so obsessed with growth. The town I live in, a delightful, charming place, is being destroyed by growth. The university is being mutated into a cancer that absorbs and destroys the quality of life for the campus and the town. But it will be a Big University, and that is, alas, all that matters.

Snarking aside, being big is not, by default, better. Books are too often too long. Don't be afraid to cut. Remove whole scenes. The joy of computer-aided writing is that you can copy out the entire novel in a blink, tear it to shreds, rearrange the bits, keep what works, paste that into a new version, and delete the rest.

Do hire an editor. They aren't enamored with your words, only with the finished product. They have the objectivity to see what is extraneous where you can't bear to let anything go. Trust your editor!

The final advice of the article is one all writers hear frequently. Get off the internet.

Time, lots of time, gave us life on earth. Even more sweeps of time gave us our selves. What's a few months to give life to your words?

Creative Creativity

I admire his creativity, but I hope the future is brighter than this for him -- and for me!

Writing in Reverse, and How On Earth Does One Self-Edit, Or Self-Evaluate?

I'm quite enjoying writing backwards. I ask myself, where do I want this character to be at the end of the story, and then I write. I refer to things that will need to be added or explained earlier in the story.

Then I ask, how did they get from the beginning to where they are now? What had to happen for the ending to happen as written? Add in the points I mentioned above, and a scene in front of the one I just wrote takes shape. Step by reverse step, I'm finding out where the story is coming from, rather than where it's going.

I may not get anything written tonight. Busy, busy, unfortunately. But I did jot down some ideas, and I got a section of the story worked up for my critique group.

I had another melt down last evening. I looked at my writing and thought, "This is crap. Total, incontrovertible crap."

Then I started writing, forgot about crappiness, and just enjoyed the story.

I keep wondering about my desire for external validation. There is a notable agent that is accepting the first 20 pages from ten local authors for her critique. Even if it weren't out of my budget, I wonder if I would do that. If she said it was no good, I wouldn't stop writing. If she said it was good, I still wouldn't stop. So, why seek opinions?

Obviously because I have no confidence in my own abilities. How does one acquire that objectiveness? All I read (and I read so very much) about self-editing seems inevitably to rely upon one's own discernment of what 'feels' right.

All I know is that when my editor has returned pages to me with lots of green crossings-out, I cannot understand why this was cut and not that, or why this emotional depiction was deemed unacceptable but this other was okay. I remain perplexed.

He tells me I should write more, and thus learn. Well, huh. I wonder how much writing it will take for me to feel confident in what I create?

Do all you other writers get hung up on this? Do you feel you know when you've gotten it right? Do you angst over understanding, or just enjoy the writing and accept the editing?

Gratuitous Sex and Violence, or Realism?

Young Adult, as a category, has become increasingly violent and sexual. There are books that are not, but these themes are prevalent. Often justified as 'realism', I always counter that realism also includes laughter, love, and happy times. Admittedly, those don't make such compelling reading.

Without getting into the research I've read on the cultural / social motivations for this trend, I find myself speculating on how much, if any, sex and violence I want to include in my current YA Experimental Novel.

Write what you feel. Yes, but there is a perverse streak in me that wants to turn this into another sort of experiment. Like the idea of writing a 70k novel (with editing and revising) in just over a month as a break from editing, I find I want to experiment stylistically as well.

It is not my nature to write sex and violence. It might be intriguing to see what happens if I make myself do so.

If the emotional catharsis that resulted from switching to first person in the other novel is anything to go by, the results of such an experiment could be mind-blowing.

Curiouser and curiouser....

I'll let you know what happens. But, I wonder how others feel: do you find yourself thinking about, or actually writing more sex and violence in YA than you would have a few years ago?

Sooty, Science, and Writing Backwards

I'm still struggling with the desire to get back to editing. Who knew it could be so seductive? But I need to keep to my goal, too.

This is not arbitrary. I need some sense of accomplishment, some goal I have attained. The editing -- who knows how long that will go on? After I work through all the notes I've made of things to add, clarify, or rewrite, I need to go over the work as a whole. Then it gets bundled off to my long-suffering editor. Then back to me for who knows how much more work.

Sooty, though, I am treating as an experiment. Yes, I want a good novel. Yes, I must be proud of it or I won't put it out. But I'm trying to learn necessary skills by doing them, not by reading about how to do them. Applying intellectually attained knowledge in the real world. That sounded pretentious enough, don't you think?

I'm doing something new tonight. When I took Adjacent Possibilities through the first round of editing, I pulled out all the scenes that had passed muster with The Editor, and then rewove the story around them. This got me thinking. There is no compelling need to write the story in sequence.

After all, this is how I solve mazes and other puzzles. Start at the end, then work backwards. For some reason that often works better for me.

So, I worked on the ending tonight. I was fascinated to find myself tying together threads that hadn't yet been spun, making connections that hadn't yet been clearly visualized.

I am also *forcing* myself, and it takes real will, to just write. The page is a mass of red squiggles, but the story is there. I will correct typos later. Right now, I want to see if I can get the words.

I have also started a bookmarks page, with links to articles on chemistry and on the many things we use everyday that came out of the space program. I wish schools would teach that fact: even space research, so often held up as an example of unnecessary spending and wasteful hubris -- our lives have been enriched in so many ways through products developed for the space program. Discoveries are often serendipitous. We might as well cut off our hands and feet as cut funding to research, or even require, as short-sighted politicians do, that research produce immediately usable results. Foolish, foolish blindness.

That was my soap box for today. And yes, there will be a hint of that in Sooty.  I cannot seem to help myself. I have to have intelligent characters who understand the value of science and research, of thinking, and of being reasonable. 

The Trouble With Taking Breaks

I am working on Sooty, the young adult speculative fiction that I will (!) have done by then end of the month.

But now, only a week or so into my break, I am longing to return to editing my philosophic, romantic, thoughtful but light-hearted novel, Adjacent Possibilities. It is calling to me. Like the wafting scent of the sweet peas I picked yesterday, like the fluffiness of a cat's tummy needing to be rubbed, like a path leading into the green darkness of a Cascadian forest, it entices.

The sirens were not so compelling.

Argh.

70k Words in 39 Days -- Or -- Yes, I've Gone Bonkers

Not just words, mind you, but a revised and edited novel. Something I can be proud of.

I realized the other day that for the last, oh, 8 or 9 months I've been doing revision. And editing. Two full length novels, very different, but still.

Now these tasks are both challenging and rewarding, but I like to write, too.

I also need a break so I can step back from the story that's been getting my main focus before I attempt yet another full-length edit and then revision.

And I want a feeling that, yes! I've finished something (as much as any writing can ever be said to be finished).

These points combined gave me the idea to write a young adult novel of about 70,000 words, written, edited, revised by the end of August. I will allow more revision and editing in September, but I want it to be as close to ready to go as I possibly can make it by midnight, 31 August.

I hope to have it up as an ebook by mid-September. I have to learn all that stuff anyways, so that adds to my motivation.

I will be posting a daily word count, and occasional bits from the story. I'll add links to articles that give me ideas, or references to topics discussed.

I will also ask questions, seek advice, and maybe even run a contest to name a character or set a scene.

Hmmm - now that would be interesting. Let someone tell me where to set a scene and then have to work it into the story in a credible way. Fascinating....

Without further ado, I announce that as of today, after four days of writing, I have 16,230 words down.

I was feeling confident because I will have a lot of free time in August. But today a one hour errand ended up taking over three hours, and that has shaken my certainty a tad. Well, that just means more time writing tonight, right?

More Than Merely Literary Fiction

I still puzzle over what differentiates literary from genre.

"I know it when I see it" is so often the final definition. Character driven, high-minded, complex, many layered.

I love this definition: "Work of great sensibility and refinement, where it can take up to 500 pages for nothing to happen." from Frank Baron

In the end, it is, like almost everything in life, a spectrum. There are books that are genre, no question. There are books that are literary, equally without question.

But all along the way, there are books whose ideas, whose writing style, whose detailed evocation of place, mood,or character are so eloquent that, even though there is a romance, or a crime, or an alien invasion, they are also literary.

Over and over we read  that everything in the story must move the story forward. Every scene must fill at least two roles: establishing motivation, explaining necessary backstory, revealing character, and so on.

Perhaps part of the difference, then, is that in literary fiction, you have greater latitude in how much you reveal or the pace at which you move the story forward.

In literary fiction, you can have, as in "The Life of Pi", paragraphs of imagery and impressions that serve to create the mood of the story and the way in which the character views the world that in a genre book would be considered too slow. "Tighten it up" I hear an editor cry. "You'll lose your readers' interest."

And you would, if they were reading it as a detective story or a romance story. But when the book aspires to be something besides -- note - not more than -- science fiction or thriller; when the writer wants to draw you into a world or a state of mind; then you are entering the world of literary fiction.

And we are left again with personal preference. I might read it and see it as a literary fantasy. You might read it and see it as fantasy only.

This is part of why I favor the label Speculative Fiction. It allows the idea that elements of fantasy or science fiction are not the absolute arbiter of the story's classification. A space ship can carry the tragedy of Hamlet in its crew, and a mystery can encompass the eternal question of what it means to be human.

I could wish that we weren't so determined to make arbitrary distinctions. I realize that, like standardized testing in the schools, there are times we need to stick labels on things. But if we are interested in understanding what books have to offer, then we need to look past the labels publishers and booksellers require and accept a book on its individual nature.

Any time we break down barriers, we are enriching our world.

Another Round of Sympathetic Insecurity

I've found several comics that accurately reflect the potential, and often realized insecurity of artistic endeavors.

This is the most recent one:

(click to enlarge)

http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/archive/560.jpg

Your Work Lacks Confidence

Oh dear. I feel like this all too often. It is annoying.

 http://www.savagechickens.com/wp-content/uploads/chickencrapart.jpg

Creating Real Worlds and Real Characters

This post,'The fallacy of difference, in science and art', puts a proper label on something I've been mulling over for a long time.

Fallacy of Difference.

We focus on what's unique, or defining, and forget commonality.

A character whose defining attribute for my story is her supportive role for the protagonist is still a real person. I ask myself, not "what would a supporting character do?"  but rather, "What would Sara do?", because she is real to me. But I see where I have failed to create this reality in other characters.

It holds for settings, for ideas, for plot. Nothing should be defined by its uniqueness. That is one dimensional. Strive instead for facets that reflect points of view. Create a virtual reality or a hologram, not a flat, static image.

Three dimensional writing - no, has to be four. Time, and the changes time brings are essential in life and in art.

Anger as Ink

What motivates us?

Compassion? Anger? Hate? Love?

What makes us want to keeping pushing, struggling to accomplish what needs to be done?

Life sets up more than sufficient obstacles. Just the every day work of surviving holds us in place, keeps us from reaching out too far towards what we want.

Other people hold us back. Not only out of spite or their needs, but simply because we are tied to them through so many types of bonds. But those bonds hold us to them, and thus back from what we want to become.

We set obstacles for ourselves: inertia, apathy, fear - oh yes, fear. The fear of failing, the fear of being laughed at - even the fear of succeeding.  I want this. But what if I get it and I don't like it after all? Then what have I?

My biggest motivation seems to be anger. Initially at other people, then at the fool I am, but also at myself for believing I cannot do what I've set out to accomplish. For believing what others want me to believe rather than admitting, or even allowing hope of admitting what I know to be true about myself.

Anger is what forces me to realize that I am my own worst enemy. I cannot rest until I cause problems for myself, and then, when I've made enough of a mess, I can finally recognize it and start to clean it up.

The price is high. It is not a good way to accomplish your goals - alienating people, deliberately making problems for yourself. But if it increases the pressure enough that an explosion, however small, happens, then I suppose it's worth it. Anything to get out of despair and back into action.

Hopefully someday action will come without such finagling. Leaving a trail of self-destruction is not the best way to get out of a swamp and onto solid ground.

But to be angry at all is, for me, an amazing thing. It means I am finally learning that I don't have to bow my head and take blame for what others impose on me. I am not stuck. I can break out.

So anger becomes the ink to my pen. I can write, because I have to prove I am not incapable, not stupid, not such a fool as life, and the habits I've learned in life make me believe I am.

Having once done so, well, there's a whole world of new problems to face. But at least anger gives the energy to meet the challenge.

Damn Good Writing

A writer writes good words. Some authors, even successful ones, can't do that, but they have An Idea that trumps their lack of facility with words.

A good writer has both ideas and words.

A Damn Good Writer writes with the passion of someone who's just been fired and is pouring out their rage onto an email that, hopefully, will never be sent. Or a lover who is alight with the glory of that first love-making. Or a parent whose child has died. Or a child who didn't get what they wanted for christmas.

Raw emotion. Blazing, searing, terrifying, elating: the feelings that pull us out of ourselves, out of thought and reason.

A Damn Good Writer not only can write those emotions, they can then take them and craft them to distill the essence of those emotions into clear, accessible prose.

And when A Damn Good Writer does this, the words burn on the page.

We cannot all be writers. Even fewer can be good writers. But to be a Damn Good Writer - that is the hope and the despair of longing.

Cracked, and Writing is Despair - when it's not elation

I was doing my morning's routine of reading comics, then blogs. Science, philosophy; and there's a few writing ones I like to follow. Though for writing I mostly use Twitter - a random idea jumps out and says "Here! This is what you've been needing to think about!" For which I am truly, truly grateful.

Anyways, on one of the philosophy blogs I followed a link and discovered that  the book I've been working one for the last year is, apparently, a cheap flimsy watered-down version of the sort of novels some very famous (in the right circles) (which I obviously don't inhabit)  (which is another point of despair) person has been writing for many years now.

All my hundreds of hours of research, my hundreds of hours of writing, my in progress hundreds of hours of editing - for what?

And I am sunk once again in inescapable gloom.

What's the point? I know I am not unique, that no one is unique, that every story has been told thousands of thousand of times... but I was feeling pretty good about my book up to that moment.

I used to be a very stable person. Not without upheavals, but generally rational, reasonable, and not prone to gloom.

Since becoming a writer, my life is the proverbial roller-coaster. And not with slow steady swings from elation to despair.

Oh no. That would be too easy. Like a toddler with a light switch my brain leaps from extreme to extreme, within the same bleeding sentence.

So then I find this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-to-become-author-in-5-incredibly-difficult-steps/

I don't know how I hadn't seen it before. Cracked is a wonderful place for researched information in a quirky, irreverent style.

Being able to laugh, even though being reminded yet again (and I didn't need the reminder - I never forget) that I am not in the tiniest bit unique, made me feel better.

And I will write today. How could I not? It is who I am, for good or ill.

Ante-Meridional Arrogance - or - The Tyranny of the Lark

I read writing blogs. How to Write. How to Edit. How to Solve All your Writing Dilemmas.

I do get some useful hints. But I have to complain about one thing. 

There is a conspiracy against night-people. 

Over and over I read how the best time for writing is early in the morning. 

The house is quiet. Everyone is asleep. The day hasn't begun. My mind is relaxed.

Yeah, my mind is relaxed at 7 am, too. Soundly relaxed. 

There is no inherent reason why getting up early is more virtuous or more productive than staying up late. 

Point by point from the above:

'The best time for writing'. No. When I'm up at night, my mind is more focused, my thoughts cooperate, words come easily. Editing works better, perhaps, during the daylight hours, but not writing. 

'Everyone is asleep'. This is more problematic. If at all possible, everyone in my family  is asleep in the morning. Including me. And we are all awake at night. But we are all working at our desks, not bothering anyone. Students, teachers, writers, you see.

'The day hasn't begun'. When I wake up, I'm thinking about everything I have to do that day. The to-do list looms large in my mind, thwarting my writing compulsion. I have to get that list cleared before I can focus on my work. At night, it's done, or it is to do in the nebulous, far off tomorrow. Night time is off-time. 

'My mind is relaxed'. As above, my mind is very relaxed in the morning. Foggily, dazedly, dreamily relaxed. I do occasionally wake up with an idea. I jot it down in my handy bedside notebook, and go back to dream some more. Often the process repeats several times, and when I wake, entire scenes have become clear. I've even got an outline for an entire novel that came in those blissful wake, doze, write, dream cycles.

Why do morning people insist they are superior? Arrogant, boastful, condemning. Totally unable to see what is so apparent to night people: it doesn't matter when you do your work. It matters only that it gets done. You criticize me for sleeping until 10. Shall I then criticize you for being asleep at midnight? I could, with equal justification.

We should start a campaign. Let us call all those sanctimonious morning people at midnight, and ask why they aren't being productive. “You're wasting the day!” we could exclaim, horror filling our voices. “You're wasting your life!”

No, alas, the justification is not equal. Along with the rampaging extroverts (of whom I shall write another day) our world is run by morning people. But listen up, folks. We've had indoor light for millennia. Since the days our ancestors first built fires to light the darkness, we've been able to stay up late. And what do people do when they stay up late around a campfire? 

They Tell Stories.

Stories and night are a natural partnership.

One final note. People who wake early are known as Larks. People who stay up are Night Owls. 

Which bird is associated with wisdom?

Further reading:

AL Kennedy did a magnificent, marvelous post on the ideal writing day: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/09/al-kennedy-ideal-writing-day 

In the interest of proving I lack bias, I shall also include: Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19174_5-unexpected-downsides-high-intelligence.html   The first entry is on night owls and intelligence. But note – they include my caveat, that it's most likely not the late hours, but the high stress that's causing the negative effects. And as for interrupted sleep, well, if those blasted early birds would just leave us alone....

Writers And Philosophy: A Series

Why would it be important for a writer to know about philosophy? Writers write. Philosophers… philosophize. Whatever that means.
 

Philosophy is a way to understand the world we live in, including ourselves.

Philosophy is also a structured method of inquiry based on rational arguments.

If the word philosopher makes you think of a guy in a toga, or, for a more compelling character, a naked guy running down the street shouting 'Eureka'*, you're right.

If the word philosopher makes you think of emaciated, unkempt people with shaggy hair and glasses, you're also right. Ditto for tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and employing, even if not actually using a pipe (props are good in character descriptions).

Philosophers are also perfectly normal people you could pass by on the street with nary a second glance.

It isn't the appearance that matters. It's the mind.

Philosophy is using mind to understand the world. It is a method for looking at an unknown and using reason in an attempt to make it known.

Find correlations. Propose a hypothesis. Create rational arguments to support your idea. Then argue, in the active sense of the word, with other thinkers.

But it's not just talk. Philosophy also requires continuing observation, seeking new information and adjusting your position to fit facts as they are confirmed.

Sounds a lot like science, doesn't it?

Science is a product of the philosophic mind. Without embracing a quest for knowledge; true knowledge, not myths or illusion; our world wouldn’t have medicine, indoor plumbing, or computers.

Pick something you really like. Now thank a scientist for it. And even more, thank a philosopher. They laid the ground work that became the scientific method.

That habit of using their mind is why philosophy is important to writers.

Writers create.

They create worlds. Characters. Plots. They devise and solve mysteries. They explore facets of human nature. They delve into the relationships between people.

All these are aspects of the philosopher's work. The methods used to solve real problems in the real world will also help a writer master the complexities of their created world. Focused thought, questioning and analyzing motivations, settings, even plot points: the philosophic method will help you see where you've left holes or created inconsistencies.

Approach your story as its Official Philosopher. Can you make sense of the world as it is presented? Can you use facts given to predict other aspects of that world? If not, then the world is irrational and incomplete. If yes, then you've got a real world to explore with your characters.

In this series we'll explore several facets of storytelling, and show how a philosophic outlook on these points might enrich your creations.

* Eureka – from the Greek heurēka, meaning 'I have found (it)'

The legend: Archimedes got into his bath, and realized that the water spilling out was equal to his body's volume. Hence, the image of him running naked through the streets.

He was later asked to determine the purity of a gold crown, and used his displacement theory to solve the puzzle.

Creativity

And, because no matter how seriously I take something, I must still have humor, I open and close with two comics that I love.

To put our words out for the world to stare at is to make ourselves vulnerable. So why do it? What do we hope to gain that might balance the possible hurt and misunderstanding?

Part of it is, quite truly, that we can’t help ourselves. We think, we feel, we need to express it, and writing is a splendid vehicle. We feel we are sharing, but we never actually see anyone reading our hearts. Unless someone writes us a comment on what we so boldly sent out into that ephemeral reality, we'll never know their thoughts. But we also write because we are finding our way to understanding our relationships to the world, to other people, and to ourselves.
 
Art is deceptive: most especially music, but also poetry. Music gets into our very souls and creates in us extremes of mood that are not real, though based in our reality. Poetry, if it is to be understood, does the same. What intellectual involvement reading and reflecting require can be swept away by the emotions and images evoked. Painting, too, pulls us out of ourselves. Prose is the safest. One gets drawn in the world of the story, if it’s any good, but it is easier to keep clear where reality lies.

And yet, any writing can be our soul struggling to slip away from our rational mind. Our souls cannot face harsh sunlight, but rather, prefer to wander through shadowlands of allusion, illusion, metaphor, imagery of all types. They hold our hearts in their hands, and we watch their meanderings with a wondering, perhaps fearful eye. Have we given too much of ourselves? Too little? Have we communicated what we intended to express?

And does any of that really matter? Perhaps the greatest joy of any artistic endeavor is that what we meant to say is rather irrelevant. We’ve had all the turmoil, the agony and the ecstasy of putting our minds, our souls and our hearts into a concrete form. Now our auditors or our readers take what they can from it, and make it theirs.

Do we write to understand or to inspire understanding? Is creativity to show only your vision or is it present your vision in the hopes that others will use it to find visions of their own? It could, perhaps should be both.

To create is to see, to feel so intensely that it consumes you, but then to take that overwhelming urgent passion and turn it inside out, twist it, pound and shape it until it takes a form that reaches out from you into the perceivable world. It requires incredible courage and discipline, as well as an innate ability.

The frisson certain music gives; the gasp of involuntary response to a word, a scene in a movie or novel; the shimmering glimpses of empathy in a poem: these are human needs, human sympathies. What could be more important than that which makes us more human to one another?

Art speaks of love, of longing, and of the compelling urgent needs our bodies like to throw into all our endeavors. It speaks of our wistful desire to know another human, and to feel connected with them. It also speaks of trying to grapple with the meanings behind the illusions our minds delight in shaping.

What we perceive in ourselves is not the reality of who we truly are. It is what we want to be, what we think we are, what we are afraid we are. Writing is a catalyst that, like any creative act, exposes us, pulls us out of our flimsy shells, and forces us, if we have any interest at all in understanding ourselves and others, to look at things most people would prefer to gloss over.

As an artist, I put my naked soul out to be examined. What you feel when you read my words, whether of empathy or sympathy, or even disgust, is yours. But what I offered has now become both yours and mine.

Perhaps we are all interconnected on some level: perhaps not. But we do all feel, and some think, and creativity requires both. Take joy in being creative. It tears you to shreds, it fills you with elation: somewhere in between, it is you.

 I'm never quite certain of the etiquette of using images. Lolcats said to help myself. But just to be safe, here's the links to the two comics:

http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/110204.html

http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/050509.html