Turning Word Churn into Exisite Fiction

 As a human being that has been writing cathartically for nearly 30 years, I sometimes forget that few of us mortals have a constant, incessant, and inescapable churn of words roiling in the space between their ears. Sometimes I even get little zips of electricity in my fingertips if its been to long since I touched a keyboard.

Whewwwww.

If I go too long without writing, its almost as if a backlog of thoughts is piled up inside my noggin. The Great Word Churn of Ideas, trying to take form and become something more than mere electrical impulses stuck within my mind.

And that is the hardest part of being a writer, its often simply getting to the act of it without a sort of shame attached to it. Maybe instead of writing I should be doing one million other, more important things. Like learning Latin, or moving my body, or meal prepping, or sending a text to someone I love, or cleaning the house, or watering my garden. There are innumerable things more important than the clickity clack of the keys, and black letters popping up on a screen...

right?

Write.

That is sometimes the reward within itself, it is the act of rebellion against all the things I should be doing and instead doing the thing that makes my soul catch fire.

Life has taken me in interesting directions. I live in Florida now, tucked into a recently gutted and remodeled historic home. It's a strange feeling living inside a box that is always kept at constant temperature of 72 degrees, when the outside world here is a piping 90-something on the regular. Even when I lived in Ohio, I never had such consistent HVAC as this.

But back to the original point. We now live in a world of images and videos and incarnations of things that are no longer so symbolic. When a person posts a video, its hard to imagine any other thing except for what you see with your eyes and hear with your ears. Writing on the other hand is an ambiguous experience, where the words the writer is sharing may elicit a different image for each person that reads it. Even with exquisite description and irrevocable prose, an emerald skinned dragon that can spew liquid gold from its mouth, probably looks a little bit different inside everyone's mind.

Writing is the ultimate form of symbolic meaning, as each letter of the alphabet correlates with a sound, and when spliced together with other alphabetic symbols, words gather up meaning in the shape of things. When someone reads the word dragon, its almost as if the shape of the word itself is directly hitched to the mind's eye of its manifestation. Do dragons exist? Absofuckinglutely--they exist in the cumulative imaginations of us all.

 A series of symbols, when strung together in the most precise sequence, can elicit a hallucination, a glimpse into a world that does not (yet) exist.  When JRR Tolkien or RR Martin or JK Rowling listened to the voices in their heads, and transcribed those images into words, so that others may also share in their vision, that is the ultimate form of symbolic reasoning when you can incite collective hallucinations.