The Secret Worlds of Writing

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The Secret Worlds of Writing.

Writing happens in the confluence of secret worlds. The first is the world of our head, where memory, language, images and experience, together with the internal cadences and rhythms of our inner voice, collide. There is a solitude to this world which, when we allow ourselves the time and space to explore, we find is as vast and rich as any landscape. We speak differently to how we write- how we tell our story on paper, as opposed to telling our story with voice, is a layered, textured encounter. Before utterance, there is the invitation to explore the spaces and places which comprise our inner landscape, and in doing so, expand it. This expansion alone warrants the writing, whether or not we choose to share or even develop what gets written.

From this inner world, ink is a conduit. On paper, as words make our way to our hands, the speed of the written forms, the pace in which the letters land on the page, seem to provide pause enough for new articulations and ideas to form. I’ll forever be an advocate of handwriting for this very reason. The hand-brain connection seems to reach into that private world of the imagination and access ideas from an embodied, often more emotionally nuanced or charged place. A blank page is where the first discharge of this electrical connection of body and mind is made manifest, and those initial drafts often capture the energy of a first encounter. The first kiss of ink to page holds an erotic tension, which can birth worlds. But first, we must we willing to come closer, to make the first move, to offer part of ourselves to the page.

Once we encounter the page, craft also enters. We learn how to be playful with how we place images, and then to re-arrange them. We realise it is all a wild experiment; here we get to conjure elements out of our secret world of the mind, combine with words, and figure out what ones to amplify and what to discard. Through these twin currents of assembly and disassembly, what we choose to keep and what we select to jettison, we are emboldened with a sense of agency. We are both the breakers and the makers, and, as we create these worlds, we too are made. Here is another expansion, which again, whether we choose to share the writing or not, the very act of writing is warranted.

Writing as opposed to speaking has always given me access to ways of thinking, seeing and perhaps most importantly, connecting, which the oral tradition does not. Here, on the page, my world is formed with detail and colour; where past and present converge in an emergent conversation. On the page, even the imaginal world evidences as a tangible, seen world. The pages start to fill. The ink runs low. There is something to hold. Letters as bricks. Sentences as bridges. Words as organic matter.

Then, beyond the first secret world, there is the second secret world: the world of the reader. From page to eye to mind and heart, words are transported in a sacred covenant between writer and reader; an invisible thread that can extend beyond boundaries, time, borders, eras, ideologies, definitions, selfhood. As a writer, what a privilege it is to have ones words carried into the body of another. As a reader, what a magic it is to have access to another's inner landscape. Not all stories have to be shared, or deserve to be shared, for that matter, but the ones that are, become alive again in the reader. Some of those words even get to live on, as mirrors to the reader’s own lives, or maps or counter-maps saying ‘go this way’, or ‘definitely not that way’. Our stories, when offered to another, take up a new residence beyond which we have any control. To share our story is also to birth the potential for new ways of being, for ourselves, for the reader, and perhaps, just perhaps for the places and spaces between. Which is also to say: to write our story, and then to share our story is to birth new secret worlds.