A friend in class last night talked about a writer she'd seen in Atlanta...and that speaker gave a talk about writing as a gas, liquid, and solid. Wow, did that get my brain going.
The idea being: when we have ideas, they're like gas. We can barely see them, they're with us, but vapor-like and have no shape. When we begin writing, they're shapeless, like water. We can put them in different containers (short stories, novels, romance, mystery, etc.) But it is still forming, lacks anything we can quite hold onto. Then it becomes a solid, a complete piece that we can look at, pick up, and begin to wonder what it will take to chisel it to a polished piece... This reminds us that even when we think we're finished, there is always polishing to do.
It begs the question: How many times do I let the gas slip through my fingers and not get it to the liquid stage, much less the solid?
So why am I blogging when there are gases out there just waiting, aspiring to be water?
2 comments:
Happy B-day.
Your post makes me think of a part of Frank Smith's book Writing and the Writer (pg 65-67) of how thought is not language, that language is generated by our thought, there is an interaction between thought and language, "the language that our thought produces modifies our thought as it is produced, just as the image in a painter's mind develops as each brush stoke is applied to the canvas" and "(l)anguage permits thought to fold back on itself ... provides a basis for new or modified ideas" ... which is why we ask our students, and ourselves, to get something written, then reread it, thus forming more thoughts, which become language ...
A bit deep coming from me, I know, but just something I read and agree with.
Yes, deep, but it's definitely a "Juanita thought"...
I like the brush stroke on canvas equated to writing, because it IS just like that.
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