Chaos, Writing, Thinking, Creating
And how it all comes together
Writing, from a certain perspective is easy to understand. You need some kind of implement (it can take any guise you like) and a blank slate to record your thoughts on. That’s it.
But that is not it. While the paragraph above describes the technicality of writing it doesn’t describe what it really is. To understand why not consider that writing, the action, is an expression of writing, the thought. You can have writing without thinking and thinking without writing and while both are perfectly valid in their own right, the art form that we consider to be writing which transforms the person performing it from a scribe into an artist, takes place only when the two converge.
Which sort of begs the question: if writing is the convergence of thinking and acting what is there prior to it? The answer to this is chaos. Chaos means that whatever exists does so with no discernible order to it. And that is actually what defines writing. Thinking too can be chaotic. We can all easily let our thoughts meander inside our heads, we can free-associate, perform mental stream-of-consciousness exercises or daydream. But in order to think about something in detail we need to understand it and in order to understand it we have to categorize it.
“The twin lenses of context and intent are found in various proportions in every human activity that holds meaning.”
Categorization creates entities, ontologies, taxonomies and hierarchical layers of values where things become abstracted into representations and symbols all of which denote specific values that, at some point require context to give them true meaning and intent to make them useful.
The twin lenses of context and intent are found in various proportions in every human activity that holds meaning. It is no coincidence, for example, that we form inner monologues inside our head that create a narrative structure of our own lives. Narratives hold several layers of meaning, both literal and abstracted. The literal ones arise out of their content and its structure but the abstracted ones come out of the ‘moral’ of each story and its significance to the context of the culture within which it becomes embedded and its intent in so embedding it.
Would The Odyssey, for instance, hold much meaning to a desert dweller who has never seen the sea? Or to a proverbial Martian who has never heard of Troy, a woman called Helen and a man named Ulysses who was responsible for ending a ten-year-long war? Reading the writing would be easy enough but understanding what it means beyond what it relates would require an awareness of culture and its importance. It would need empathy with beings long dead and some understanding of their feelings.
To convey all that then writing needs not just detail what happened. It needs to create a narrative that is sufficiently evocative to create its own context and, inevitably, intent. Reading The Iliad, we are aware of the devastating beauty of the fabled Helen who runs away with Paris to Troy and, in the process, we become aware of the power of love and the ability of passion to blind oneself to personal responsibility and the consequences that arise out of our own actions.
So, writing is a highly encoded form of communication that takes place from one mind to another. It may require some kind of hard coding in between. But it is in the accuracy of the decoding that the true ability of the encoder is measured. And it is here that we truly get to test the ability of one mind to imagine the capabilities of many others. That’s what makes writing magical and a book a gateway into another world.
The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
Originally published at www.goodreads.com.
