My Writing on Thoughts: My Thoughts on Writing
Does precise writing stifle creativity?
As a species, we communicate primarily through writing. Literacy has no doubt improved learning, but does the act of translating thoughts into words harden cognition and narrow our creative abilities?
For me, thinking is seldom linear: imagine shmoo-shaped colors, textures, and emotions rubbing, tugging, and mixing in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Somehow, that system produces a communicable idea.
Whenever someone asks me a question, I immediately have a pinging sensation. Then, somehow I translate that into a response. Ask me again and there’s less pinging, but you’ll get the same or similar response (and perhaps a hint of irritation). It’s like my brain has created a record of the question and a shortcut for me to make thinking easier.
I shall call it learning.
The problem is that precise writing is rigid. (Ignore creative writing, poetry, and other artful forms for the moment.) So, if we communicate our thoughts primarily with rigid tools, over time our brains create shortcuts and scaffolding that promotes rigid thinking, making things easier.
See the problem?
Thankfully, not all communication is verbal. Artists (as writers categorize them) use movement, imagery, sound, void, touch, emotion, and all sorts of sensory to (as they say) express themselves. So do athletes. (Not so much the mathletes.)
Generally, artists who excel visually, aurally, and spatially come up short linguistically. They’re called “creatives”, and their expressive mediums are far less rigid; but, that doesn’t mean they’re not useful for precise communication.
But, that’s another post for another day.
A (slight) counterpoint… I’m a writer. I have to!
I consider the writing process to be creative. I have an idea (or if it’s you were talking about, have many ideas at once), and then I work through the writing process to refine that idea. I roll it over, I look at it from different angles, I talk about it out-loud myself, and finally, when I’ve got what I want, I write it down in the most precise way I can. In other words, I go through the creative process, get the lesson I need to get from the subject, and then I write.
After all that, why would I need to revisit it? That’s like drawing up a house plan, pouring the foundation, building the frame, doing the finish work, and then afterwards, tearing it down and re-doing it. All for the sake of creativity? No. You just move onto the next house (and the next creative process).
That’s what makes sense to me.
By writing precisely about complicated matters, you are creating new ways for people to understand something that they may not have understood before, you are making it require less intelligence to understand something.
The paradoxical thing about creativity is after you do something creative, it ceases being creative. Non-writing activities seem more creative than writing because there are only so many letters and words but essentially infinite gestures, colors, shapes etc.
Of course writing and the writing process, in itself, is creative.
But, I think we need to refine ideas because they make thoughts easier to communicate with writing, not because they necessarily need to be refined.
Why can’t we embed all of the angles in writing? Why do you include only what you ‘need’? Writing limits what you can communicate, and in its restrictiveness, it stifles creativity. (But, it does make writing more creative.)
I do also think that restriction can foster creativity, but that’s only if you embrace it.
This is why this post is filed under “thoughts” and not “declarations”.
An idea is refined in order to communicate the idea effectively in words. But two people can never hold the exact same idea. Even if an idea is conceived together (which is the only real way to have two individuals equally participating in one idea), each person’s idea will inevitably diverge at a point. But by refining it precisely, whether or not the idea was conceived together, each person has his own point from which to begin thinking about it.
I cannot help but think of my favorite precise writer, Emily Dickinson. Her words were the birth of many of my ideas, but I am confident that they were not the same as her ideas. Arguably, that is the point of (reading) creative writing.
But beyond creative writing, and back to thoughts and ideas in general, would I ever want to hold the exact same ideas as anyone else? In fact, why would I ever need to communicate my exact thoughts to another person? Would I even want to understand another person’s thoughts exactly? What would that level of understanding get me?
Lauren: “In fact, why would I ever need to communicate my exact thoughts to another person? Would I even want to understand another person’s thoughts exactly? What would that level of understanding get me?”
I don’t know! That’s the point. We use writing to communicate a singular point, and I wonder if our penchant for pointed language limits us to understanding things.
What if you could simultaneously (and unambiguously) understand multiple view points in one line of prose? What would happen? Where could we go from there?
Thinking about ideas in a certain way creates pathways in our brains. So when we think about other ideas, it’s much easier obviously to go back to the pathways already created. You mentioned this in your post.
Do you think that if your what you say could actually happen, and we could simultaneously access multiple pathways from one line of prose, these pathways would ultimately meet at a common place? That would be pretty amazing.
And, if they never meet, quite possibly that’s all the better.
[...] (from my last post). We get along fine. Last night though, we had a little debate after he posted this piece on his blog. The comments section spins out of control a little bit at the end, but [...]
[...] (from my last post). We get along fine. Last night though, we had a little debate after he posted this piece on his blog. The comments section spins out of control a little bit at the end, but [...]