The way to do that, the only way to get something square into something round, in fact, is by sheer and deliberate unrelenting force. An act of willfulness, in other words. And what you will always have afterwards is a shambles of pieces and fragments and nothing at all that fits together harmoniously.
So what does this have to do with writing? Forcing ourselves to think of something to say—trying to make words mean something—is a common way to try to write, and an even more common way to try to revise what we’ve written unsuccessfully. We convince ourselves that we can build ideas with sentences, and since sentences are made up of words, well, it’s just a matter of finding another noun or verb, we believe, to pound our square thoughts home.
The language that results from this way of writing, to say nothing of the frustration and displeasure from working this way, is labored and studied and intensely self-assertive. We are trying to do something, when we should instead be allowing something to happen. But something happens, an insight arises, a thought comes, only when our attention is turned receptively, not graspingly, toward an idea we have in mind. And when we have trained our inner eye long and gently enough on the idea that has come to us, the expression of it takes form of itself—to the degree, that is, that we have readied ourselves beforehand to use the language adroitly. Fortune, as the classical world used to say, favors the prepared.
This misunderstanding of what writing is about centers around a confusion between ideas and thoughts. In casual conversation, we use these two words synonymously, but in the art of writing (and, in fact, in any art), an idea is the object of a thought, it’s what a thought is trying to give expression to. Ideas are quite alive in and of themselves; they are those mental pictures we carry in our heads, and it’s a mystery where they really reside and how they decide to arrive. But when we turn our thinking minds in their direction, they will play themselves out before us, giving us a picture all at once of what we mean to say. The action and initiative resides with them, and if we let them have their play and give them ground, they will take root and increase and fruit. But we must watch and not interfere, until it’s time to harvest the best of them.
And harvesting just might be another word for thinking, because when we harvest, we take and trim and prepare something to be consumed, which is just what we’re doing when we find the words and phrases to transform an idea first seen whole with our mind’s eye into a digestible thought. Ideas appear in language as nouns or phrases; the phrase finally speaking about it, for example, might be an idea that comes to us as we ponder a difficult moment with a friend. Recognizing that phrase as the idea, we could then turn to the actual circumstances in which that idea, we remember, had taken real life: after so long, he finally put down his fear and spoke to me about what had happened. All that is the linguistic structure composed of subjects and predicates, the dual mechanism of any thought, that renders the idea into a visible shape. Ideas have no time or space, but thoughts do. And as we begin to write, we begin really to compose, to put subjects to verbs, describing the one and finding a tense for the other, making a place and time for the idea that came to us to live again in our words. And with ideas made manifest like this comes their illumination.
Ideas, we might say, are round, and our thoughts square, and never will the two fit together perfectly. But art, including the art of writing, is not about perfection, but harmony: welcoming ideas to shape and fit, not shaping and fitting words to make the ideas we want. When we find ourselves processing words (the irony of the phrase cannot escape us), we’re wasting our time and energy both. Better to pause and look away, attend again to the mental picture before us, and simply and naturally speak our mind. Then, and only then, should we begin the more deliberate, assertive work of analytical revision.
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