September 30, 2008
-
Thinking, Writing
Thinking is like building cities. A developed area of thought is like a bustling metropolis. Over time, a mind in its entirety, with all its cities of thoughts of varying sizes, becomes like an expansive empire, with problems here and there, but overall is a complete functioning entity of enormous complexity. A debate is then when empires go to war against one another.
Thinking is important because everything people do and say comes from the thought behind it.
When I finish reading a book, I think, all the words in that book I already knew; how is it then that I did not know to put them in that order? If I would have, then I could have been the author of the book. Take just a paragraph and wonder the same thing. I could have written that because I knew all those words. The commodity of authors is words, and as an owner of much of the same commodity it follows that I should therefore be able to put them in the same order that other authors who knew the same words did, and that other people will like and pay money for that order of words. But the problem is that we only think of certain words because we know they hold some descriptive function to the thought we are thinking of. So really, an author is first a mind that thinks thoughts, then they are a writer that puts words to them. Many people are confused about the enteprise and focus on the latter without understanding the prerequisite of the former.
In sum we have the maxim, ‘All writers must be thinkers first.’
Comments (3)
So true. But sometimes, my favorite kind of writing requires very little thought. Just put a pen to paper and let it flow.
I’ve never really thought about the fact that every author’s story is inside everyone, just in a different word order. What a neat idea…
Well said.
Interesting thoughts. Sometimes the most simple step is overlooked. If a city is like one’s thinking, then my thoughts are like NY City. It is organized chaos that has some serious problems and too much red tape at times.
I’m sure there is a better city analogy I could have used, but I can’t think of it and it would probably be a city you are unfamiliar with.