There is a difference between looking and analyzing, and that difference marks two complementary frames of mind at work in writing and in all art traditionally understood. The distinction is not academic but entirely practical, because it can direct how we work to good effect. It can help us realize that sometimes we settle too soon, happy just to get something down on paper, rather than taking the time first to ponder and then to assemble the many sides of what we want to say.
In matters of art and creativity, when we look, we are seeing something whole, we are seeing the meaning of a particular circumstance in its entirety; we might say, loosely, that we have an idea, and by that we reveal that what we want to express is in essence complete already in our mind. In order to communicate that idea, or mental picture, to someone else in language, however, we must choose the words and the phrases which will represent under an accepted convention of linguistic symbols all the parts and distinctions and qualities which are involved in the form, or expression, of the idea that has captured our attention all at once. We must, in other words, fragment, or analyze, what we’ve mentally understood instantaneously in order to create an artifact with which someone else can see what we have seen. Interestingly, the word art originally meant skill, and the noun fact meant something made. An artifact, therefore, is something made with skill, and that is exactly our goal for the sentences we compose.
A gap, though, yawns between what we see in our mind so completely and composing sentences to represent that vision. To see is one thing, to say what we see can be quite another. We often hear, and we may often even say ourselves, that we know what we want to say, but we just can’t find the words to express it. Indeed, and recognizing the distance between those two positions of looking and analyzing can materially help us to write better—first because we will never again expect the first draft to be the final product, and second because we will know that composing an effective artifact is a matter of ever greater attentive care.
In illustration of this, let’s imagine that I want to tell you about an event that occurred to me, specifically a call I received from a friend who had gone camping in the north woods alone, a call from which I discerned that all was not well. Friendship involves emotion, and a friend in trouble provokes even more emotion. In recalling the event in order to write about it, therefore, my mind is in motion, and my memory is moving among the many parts of the original happening. We can see our word motion in emotion, whose derivation, in fact, means a moving out or about. Feeling an emotion of any kind points to the volatility of our interior world, what our looking mind is looking at, and that is the world about which we first begin to compose a draft. What our reader reads will be a composite of all the thoughts and emotions which comprised the real moment we want to express. We must try, then, to look at the moment and portray its analysis in the choice and arrangement of words in a sentence.
It would, then, not be at all unusual to write at first a sentence like this as I try to depict the event I am recalling: When John called me and when I replied, I could tell something was wrong. This sentence, though, does not successfully replicate what happened, not because its bare grammar is faulty, but because its logic, the way in which it connects its meaning, is not accurate to the moment I am looking at in my mind. We learn to sense such a default the more we are in the habit of analyzing the structure of our sentences, and here we notice immediately the subordinating conjunction when, both its first occurrence as the sentence opens and again midway through. Both of these instances create subordinate clauses of time, and as such, they work in complementarity with the main clause, I could tell something was wrong. And so perhaps the faulty logic of this sentence, which accounts for its unsuccess in communicating just what I see in my mind and wish to convey, lies with this notion of time as represented by the conjunction when.
Is it, though, really a matter of time, or is it more accurately a matter of fact—the fact that my friend called me at all in such circumstances—which alerted me to the worry that something was wrong? And further, the verb could tell in the main clause means to discern, to glean, to gather something which my friend’s calling me might provoke, but not my replying, as I seem to suggest in the second subordinate clause. Exactly what happened and why, in other words, is out of order, and that disorder has made for a confusing sentence. The second subordinate clause, in fact, positively distracts the reader from logical coherence, and seems to be a product of mounting emotion, not considered thought.
But analyzing the original emotional moment like this has given me a way to correct the sentence and give the reader a more balanced, a more accurate and truthful representation: The fact that John called me told me something was wrong, and that was confirmed when I spoke with him. Now we have both a clearer set of ideas and a cleaner progression through them. The emotion that had originally taken me away from writing so clearly has (for the moment, at least) been disciplined, and in that clear mental space the reader can both feel and understand the original moment I looked at in my mind.
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