You’ve Got to Love the Bull

Writing is energy focused through language, the written word. To be a writer is to channel energy through language.

To be an effective writer is to do so in a way that creates a meaningful connection between yourself and a reader. Meaningful means harmony.

To be a reader is to absorb a writer’s energy, and to flow with it, to surf it. When you’re on the wave and standing up you’re in harmony with the energy of the writer.

You cannot be an effective writer unless you are a perceptive reader. Effective writing reads well, and a conscientious writer reads, re-reads, and then reads again before ever publishing anything.

An effective writer has read enough to know, intuitively, how to craft a narrative that strikes at the heart of the reader and imparts a sustaining truth.

But, first, there is the writer. An energy swells within the writer. Energy is channeled by the writer. Where does this energy come from? It’s in the air. A writer is an antenna. Thus all writing begins as potential energy.

Energy wants handles. It’s like lightning that wants to be grounded. There are countless outlets for energy. Writing happens to be the one channel that works best for me. That’s because I have read so much, and paid attention to so much spoken language, that the sea of my mind is chock full of word-plankton. Energy finds form through my imagination and is thus dissipated productively — what I produce feeds back to illuminate and inform.

Writing is an intention. It happens because I want it to happen and the only prerequisite for its being is that I remain awake, aware, and alive to thoughts and language and the human condition. There’s no magic here. And I think not much talent involved. There is training, yes, but talent? Perhaps. But looking at it through the lens of energy, directed, focused, energy, helps me to take it out of the realm of the mystic and to see it as a more practical form of art. And maybe that’s what art is — applied energy.

Once I recognize that whatever this is is present all the time and running in the background, it becomes a matter of catching it, as opposed to producing it. And that takes some of the pressure off. I’m no magician. I’m more of a toreador. But this is not a bull I wish to kill.

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