1.4 Fragmentary Inspiration
Don’t think in sentences.
According to the myth of inspiration, ideas inexplicably rise into consciousness (Poincare, 1913). I associate inspiration with the disembodied mind because inspiration exists in the mind before being brought into the world. For example, Mozart carried his pieces around in his head for days before setting them down on paper (Hildesheimer, 1983). A famous Victor Hugo quote captures the disembodied mind: “A writer is a world trapped inside a person.” The trapped world begins within the writer’s disembodied mind before being freed by being written into the world.
The disembodied mind belongs to Cartesian philosophy (Descartes, 1641/1996). Cartesian philosophy inspires traditional cognitive science, which argues cognition proceeds as a sense-think-act cycle (Dawson, 2013). In sense-think-act processing, you ‘seed’ cognition by sensing information in your world. Next, thinking manipulates information, building representations you use to understand your world, and to plan possible actions. Finally, you act on your world by following a plan provided by your thinking. The sense-think-act cycle occurs in a disembodied mind because thinking occurs separately from both sensing and acting. Thinking must occur before acting; thinking provides the only means for senses to (indirectly) inform actions.
The myth of inspiration agrees nicely with sense-think-act processing. When you accept the myth, you believe writing begins in your mind (via inspiration); only after ideas arise in your mind can you act on your world by writing your ideas down. Accordingly, “in writing classes, if nowhere else, it is entirely permissible to spend large chunks of your time off in your own little dreamworld” (King, 2000, p. 235). Anne Lamott’s writing process (Section 1.3) conforms to sense-think-act processing as well: she reads her previous work (sensing); inspiration creates a movie in her head (thinking); later she types her inspired ideas (acting).
However, a writer’s thinking may not provide complete sentences. “One does not usually think in full sentences or in single words, but in clumps of half-formed ideas that correspond very imperfectly to one’s intention” (Barzun, 1975, p. 57). Inspiration could be fragmentary (Koch, 2003).
Fragmentary inspiration offers a different account of the writing process. Ideas originate as small fragments which you write down. Later, after reading and thinking about the fragments, you develop larger ideas, full sentences, and completed manuscripts. The completed work comes last: “you cannot know a story until it has been told” (Koch, 2003, p. 6, his italics).
Ray Bradbury’s writing process embraced fragmentary inspiration. He started his stories by free-associating fragmentary ideas to create lists. “I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on top of my skull (Bradbury, 1990, p. 17, his italics).
To produce a complete work, fragmentary inspiration requires you to conduct a conversation with your writing as you write. You write down your fragmentary ideas, read them, reflect upon them, and develop them into a larger fabric by writing more. ‘Writing’ becomes a dynamic back and forth between you and your written word. You let “the emerging story tell itself through you. As you tell it, you let the story give you your cues about where it is going to go next” (Koch, 2003, p. 6, his italics). John Gardner discovered “what every good writer knows, that getting down one’s exact meaning helps one to discover what one means” (Gardner, 1983, p. 19).
The dynamic back and forth between you and your written word radically changes conceptions of the writing process because the dynamic occurs between your mind and your world – the words you have already written down. The next section proposes the dynamic between your mind and your writing makes the writing process more embodied.
