I wrote this a few years back and stumbled upon it today. I actually still like a lot of the ideas in it. Shocking, as I usually find my old writings completely intolerable.
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What I like about writing is the
way that it swirls your sense of time. A good piece of fiction can make ten
pages feel read like five minutes or fifty years. Poetry makes the heartbeat of
everyday speech race, flutter, pause. Some would say that this is overtly
obvious to anyone who has read literature—clearly orchestrated in the pacing
effects of punctuation or the length of the words on your tongue. It’s more
than that though. It’s they way the images of the imagination take on more than
just spatial qualities, but also that certain metaphysical property of time
itself.
My favorite pieces
of writing have the same effect as a powerful memory. Those memories that
flower so vividly in the mind that your eyes glaze as you lose consciousness of
the bench beneath you. That snap back to the room with a start as you are
shaken from the view of your memory’s kaleidoscope. Few things are more
personal, and I would argue more valuable than these sorts of memories. The
experiences are invaluable, especially as you move further away and they come
closer and closer to resembling pinnacles of perfection. Memories are precious
yet dangerous. Over time they tend to shift radioactively, aligning their plots
to form all the better to the residual emotion retained in the memory holder’s
murky depths.
That’s where
writing is different. When you put the words down, they are destined to their
exact presentation until you consciously revisit and stir them. A memory is
assaulted by the constant, unconscious revisions of the mind. Something written
preserves the moment of its creation, pinning down its images and sentiments
like butterfly to corkboard.
I don’t know if I
am the only one but if I wait enough time and re-read my writing, I am always
surprised. Sometimes embarrassed by the honesty like a bad photograph.
Sometimes pleased, but always surprised. I pull up a story I completed months
ago, edited until I could not change another word or comma. Immediately I pick
out and remove the pointless sentences that stick out. I reword the words of
entire paragraphs like a Tetris game. I laugh at the stale ideas that seemed so
brilliant to me at the time.
Writing forces the
sort of personal growth that one must acknowledge to realize. Unlike our
memories, which are constantly doctored for and by us, writing waits for us to
reach new understandings before we can change it. In turn, this sort of
personal growth forces writing. Time itself bends the elastic of our memories.
Time gives us constantly changing experience, allowing us to bend our writing
ourselves into whatever forms we have come to imagine.
