Conjuring up some text: the writer’s struggle between first instinct and final countdown

Getting the story up and running? No problem! Release your inner vision!

Release your inner draft, that is.

“I only meant to try living the things that longed to burst out of me on their own. Why was this so utterly difficult?”

(Herman Hesse, Demian)

Right! It can't be all that difficult. Right? ... Right!

Just put a smile on your face! Listen to the sound of music! Place that message in that bottle! Catch up with the remains of the day, ever borne against the current. Find Forrester. And when you found him, keep finding him. Do the do. Hack the hack. The page is still unwritten.

Everybody knows that if one really manages to skip all the words that are not best suited for the right beginning, well, then whatever remains has got to be the right beginning. Everybody knows about paradigm collapse. About landing a pitch. About bringing a Lexem up out of nothing. Out of virtuality. Like an ultimate choice inherent to that illusionary grail of added being suspended somewhere between the big balloon we call past and the big balloon we call future. About the act of formulating something. (So the story goes.)

Everybody knows.

Remembering. Calling to mind. Stating.

And everybody keeps asking one uncanny question: What exactly does it take to spin a narrative? To get the throttle into the action. To make a particular morpheme feel the attraction.

Of course, if we could figure it without the creative writing experts we wouldn't need the creative writing experts. Or actually ... You know what? Forget the experts. Just dive in. Call up a word. Any word. Make sure, though, it's the right one.

The craft of writing is in you. Look around! Listen to the sound! Pick up a scent and follow the trail.

Creative, non-creative: all the same.

"Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile", the song kicks off. Yeah, that song. An American song. And we kind of know that, no doubt, crafting a story could have definitely been all about laughs and smiles and laughs and smiles and laughs and smiles, would tragedy had not been born out of the spirit of music someplace in deep South-Eastern Europe back in the day.

Mi, a name I call myself ...

Not too long ago a bunch of illustrious scholars advanced the notion that meaningful insight on the magic of the writing process can be brought about by employing the central principles of quantum linguistics (probability, spontaneity, non-locality, entanglement and indetermination). Soon enough a bunch of illustrious writers were found to have actually hacked the whole thing avant la lettre. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gottfried Herder, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann et. al spelled throughout their oeuvre the quantum state of mind which was supposed to be first imagined eons after their time.

They were all into it. Grabbing one secret word, one Ace from beneath their sleeve to conjure up the great mystery of paradigm collapse, indeed the very art of formulating.

And we wonder. What's the pull of a linguistic touch? What's the push? Once you get it, you've got it. There is no more to it than the blink of an eye. Some blink. Some eye.

If we had the right scale we could just weigh words. Like they used to do in the old times. And if words were made of gold we could bite them. But no: These are modern times. All we can do is count them. And then count them again. And one more time.

Till the final countdown.

One Canadian singer is said to have driven all night to get to the point. Which was alright. We could all try to drive all night, couldn't we? Only one endnote. Would we be measuring up?

In German, the idea of attributing meaning to something is expressed using the noun “meaning” in association with the verb “to measure” (“messen”), which has been modified accordingly by the prefix “bei”. Of course, language is all about measuring, all about negotiating one's way through the semantic reefs of verbal and non-verbal tools we use to deliver "IT": the thing we ought to deliver through our vehicles of expression.

While “Bedeutung beimessen” does not actually imply measuring the meaning of the analyzed object or circumstance (but, notably, to attribute them some meaning), the notion provides us a lot of clues about the subjective perspective from which the observer is viewing a fundamental semantic situation and the way perceived meaning can be negotiated and appropriated without having to give up its obscure character as such. This kind of quasi self-directed semantic measurement turns out to be peculiarly volatile.

Yes. All part of the package.

A wise man once said: The writing process is a spontaneous act of “making sense” that ought to be construed as a quantum measurement performed by a language user who feels what really, really wants to burst out of the pen on its own.

It's that simple. That complicated.