Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
Interpretation
Writing captures experiences and reflections after inspiration fades.
This quote by John Burroughs emphasizes that writing is not just a record of events as they happen, but rather a process that occurs after the initial excitement of inspiration has passed. It likens writing to fishing, where one collects insights that are often left behind in the more challenging moments of life, suggesting that true reflection and expression come from revisiting those moments with clarity and depth.
In practice
In a workshop for aspiring authors, I quoted Burroughs to illustrate how to harness their past experiences in their writing.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.
In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.
I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.
Artistic vision comes from a mind clear enough to fall in love with what we see.
Creativity helps us realize that we don't have to understand everything. We can enjoy something -feel it and use it- without ever fully comprehending it.
My hope is that witnessing the beautiful harmony created by merging different musical melodies will help people realize the beauty in our own differences.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.