On writing...

My experience of writing can be described with the figure of speech "detailing a page." I oftentimes juggle three or four big ideas at the same time - and I want to write about each one. And really three ideas I have discovered, is my limit... If I'm in the bathtub, and I've been musing.... (usually aloud) when I get to three big ideas I want to remember - that's it... I can't keep more than three topics in my mind at the same time... and still be able to get the details of those topics down on paper when I get up from the bath and go back to my computer...

As a writer, I find it a very very important ethic to get details down on paper... every detail in my mind at that point goes down on paper... and I get as many details as I can into that paragraph about the topic... which come to mind. The mistake would be to start with creating "approachable writing" - which is less detailed. The fact is that your mind is in a certain relationship with ideas at any given point in time... It's like stars in the night sky, in different alignments.

I find this interesting point when I am spacing out paragraphs on a page of text... an idea, of course, has to have some definition.... before I can leave that paragraph and push it off the page... (or leave a paragraph which has been placed on a fresh sheet of paper)

When I first started doing writing excercises every day... (I called it "excercises" at the time) I found that my pages never did get beyond the brief note stage....... what I was mainly doing was doing thinking excercises - where I explored three or four ideas at once.... (or more...!).

If you explore a topic in that manner... the ideas around the topic will incubate in your mind... and the next time you write them down... the ideas will flow in a really efficient manner.

Yes... I write many times about the same topic... or rather about a different tangent of it each time. But I don't look back at my previous work when I sit down to write again.

This is the writing I do for myself... and what I come out with is very dense and hard for most people to wade through. Now to write for readers is an entirely different thing. There, you have to show people overviews of topics. You don't want to show them all the little details. It's like a photographer who gives a person a picture of an entire valley... That might be breathtaking... but, it's very blurry when you get down close to it. To give someone a bigger picture... you have to blur the pixels - blur out the details.