You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The magic of writing.
It’s cathartic. It’s wonderful. It documents the ages and expresses the raw vision of the soul.
I was thinking about this thing that we humans do called writing.
Every culture has its own language, its own alphabet, its own way of documenting the past, questioning the present, and creatively painting things that can only be imagined.
My thoughts on writing came to me while I was – WHAT ELSE? – writing.
I was thinking about the joy of thinking.
I was pondering how the thoughts formulate and then explode onto the screen.
Like confetti in a wind tunnel, ideas fertilize, incubate, and then birth in a nano second.
What is the process? How does the dark murky matter of energy, come together in your cerebellum. How does a concept initiate? how do a sequence of words get selected. Then, in the time it takes a humming-bird to flap its wing, that birth explodes as something tangible.
Instantly, like a synaptic cannon ball that fires into the sea of consciousness, words and concepts explode forth.
The word, the thought, the idea, leaves your brain like a freight train leaving a station, flying down the tracks.
The impulse is a synaptic tomahawk flying through the ether, leaving the electrified cerebral cortex like so much lightning dancing in a storm cloud.
How do the thoughts filter down my spine into my arms, into my hands? How do the impulses suddenly end up in my fingertips where they whack away at the keys on my keyboard like tiny pistons with independent thought.
I had this strange epiphany today while I was re-writing a screenplay I first wrote in 1992 .
White Boy, among other things, is a story about overcoming adversity and tolerating differences.
What sparked this thought about writing was a specific moment I had, not just today, but many times over my writing life.
I was reading a sentence. They were words that I typed 23 years ago.
23 years ago, Bill Clinton was president, Hurricane Andrew hits Florida, The Mall of America opens.
I was living in North Carolina, my son was just born.
23 years ago, I wrote the words I was reading.
I didn’t think much about the words. They were perfectly good words describing the character, explaining where he was going and why.
As my eyes completed the sentence, getting to the end of the line, there is a tiny neural burst in my cerebral cortex. Suddenly my brain, is flooded with thought.
Before my eyes can move to the left, to begin reading the next sentence I wrote 23 years ago, my brain implants a sentence suggestion in my mind. My eyes are moving to the sentence I wrote 23 years ago and my min has all ready told me what I should write to complete that sentence.
That’s crazy, I think to myself.”
And as I begin to read the next sentence that I wrote under the Clinton Administration, the words my brain is suggesting are there in black and white on the page before me.
OMG.
Did I really just complete a sentence I wrote 23 years ago with a sentence I just conjured a nano second ago?
The same exact line?
That’s scary?
And that is the power of words. An electrical storm in the neural net of my brain sends me the same message 23 years later. I didn’t know the words were there, waiting to be suggested, yet at this precise juncture in time, Zap, they come to me in an instant.
It’s as if no time has elapsed, as if I wrote the sentence 3 decades ago.
Amazingly, my synaptic discharge is consistent.
I wrote those words as part of a 100 page project. When I couldn’t sell the story, I threw the screen play in a box.
The box has been in storage sheds, closets and now my garage.
I never think about the screenplay in the box.
But for some reason, last week, I plucked the ancient work out of the dusty box.
Suddenly my brain is filling in the next sentence in my mind that is actually written on paper put in a box 23 years ago.
It seems like a magic trick.
Where are Penn and Teller?
I was telling my cousin about this today.
He succinctly said “looks like the words were the right ones.”
Simple explanation for a very complex moment.
So when people say they have writers block or they can’t start a story and they stare at the white of the screen.
I appreciate that. I appreciate that there is always a thunder-storm in my consciousness.
I am still fortunate that ideas germinate instantly and race down my arms like race cars powered by rainbows.
I am happy to write, to re-write.
Damn, I don’t even mind writing the same sentence today that I typed 23 years ago.
To me, words are the bricks that forge the ideas that create our societal infrastructure.
Words today, words 23 years ago.
Like my cousin said “I guess they were the right words.”
I guess they were.
Life’s Crazy™