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"Have you ever noticed how a thought, when expressed aloud, can too often take its life? We've killed it, as if an energy, a living spark, has been cast into concrete. What you and Nave are doing to remedy this death is remarkable! Together, the spontaneity and immediate group energy of The Storm keep that thought fresh as it lands on the page. A recipe for Magic!"
—Gunny, post on Imaginative Storm Substack homepage
I was going to write about something else tonight, but then I saw this. Thank you, Gunny! You've described perfectly why I get so squirrelly when someone asks me what I'm writing. I thought it was superstition—I'm squarely in the don't-talk-about-something-before-it's-happened camp, rather than the put-it-out-there-and-manifest-it camp. But now I’m realizing that the reason is protectiveness. I’m protecting the possibilities of what I might write.
I've always loved the word "quicksilver." It's the old word for mercury, which is a liquid metal. Thoughts are quicksilver—but if the flow is arrested, they pool into a flat gray puddle. That’s what happens if I speak a thought aloud before I’ve explored it, or talk about a story I’m working on. Possibilities close down.
Speaking a thought aloud makes it so definite: it's that, so it isn't anything else. That's great, if it's what you want to say--but usually I don't really know what I want to say until I’ve explored it in writing. The same thing happens in my head. Once a thought gets a shape, I'm stuck with that shape.
I think this is one source of writer’s block: thinking things out before you write. The thoughts get stuck in the words your rational mind clothed them in, because your rational mind likes to be right, or to be able to judge when you’re wrong, and either way you’re fixated on those words. It’s like you’ve dressed the thoughts in words and now they’re all buttoned up inside them.
Joan Didion said that she wrote to know what she thought. I write to get new thoughts. And if I'm writing something for other people to read, it's only in the writing that I discover what I want to say.
How strange that putting words on paper should be more fluid than making patterns on the air!
When you speak aloud, you're very conscious of your words. You don't want to ramble and contradict yourself and risk making no sense, if there's someone listening. And if there's nobody listening, you're talking to yourself--which, if you haven't trained yourself to do it as a creative technique, makes you feel like you're on the edge of crazy. But when you write in the Imaginative Storm, you're weirdly less conscious of your words--or at any rate, less attached to them and what they mean about your sanity. You ring-fence irrational with rational. The paper holds your words and contains them; they're not flying around loose in the air. You can play with crazy, egg yourself on to be as irrational you can manage, and you know you'll be safely back in your everyday rational mind when the timer pings.