By fire, words, and magics, the creative conjures the beautiful, the uncanny, and words that inspire images that serve as a portal for others to step through...Writers call upon the imagination to craft their stories; uniting pleasure with truth by way of reason. Literature, as well as music, appeal to the emotions, rather than the intellect. The creative person is often lead to or guided to do their artistic work by an unseen force, i.e. the imagination, but where does this imaginative inspiration come from?
"Writers.are the keepers of the flame. We sit down at our dulcimer and try to steal a little of from heaven. We are keepers of the word - we must know the word, the proper words. We must know what the words mean, and we must know if there's a better word. And we are the keepers of the gate, we see darkness and we try to light a candle." William Kelley.
The creative person sees beyond the physical dimension through to his or her inner eye, and in sums, there is a duality at work - the ego and the inner self. The inner self, the mysterious curious self receives messages and our creativity flows. It knows no bounds. Only when the ego attempts to intercede does the inner self, the internal flame, flicker and wane, like a candle in a drafty room.
Socrates spoke of forms, matter, images, language, and thoughts that we unconsciously draw from like water from a well. We rush to the well with arms full of buckets hoping to fill it with inspiration before the candlelight goes out. With our buckets full, we return to paper and pen and stylized writing flows from the recesses of our minds. But once we empty the buckets and the well has run temporarily run dry, our writing, this stylized work we'd previously produced, now lacks harmony. Authentic style has an aesthetic all its own. It is not contrived, it is instead natural, an extension of consciousness.
"Art is thinking in images. Writing requires a special kind of thinking - thinking by means of images." As a writer, I imagine a scene in my head - the characters, their words and movements, the environment they're in, and so on, and then I write down what I see. This type of abstract imagery means that stylistically, language and metaphors paint a scene. The writer's job is to "facilitate the reception of sensation of life, to feel things, and perceive emotion." This can only be accessed on the other side of consciousness. Moreover, the writer mustn't only figure out how to spark this transcendental experience to the reader, but show the reader how to access it. (Susan Sontag, 2013)
No two readers are alike. This means, each reader will bring with him or her personal experiences to the reading of your material and as the written words travel "from the page to into the mind/psyche of the reader," the book takes on a life of its own. This is the mind processing what it read into rational thought. Therefore, the writer must in a sense, reflect on his or finished manuscript with the eyes of a reader, and after the manuscript has steeped for a while in the writer's mind, the writer should step inside of and experience the portal for themselves. This is where the magic resides.
Sontag, S. (2013). On Style. Retrieved 01/29./2013 from http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-onstyle.html
Image: John William Waterhouse
Image: John William Waterhouse