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.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.
I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don't want to make.
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.
No design can exist in isolation. It is always related, sometimes in very complex ways, to an entire constellation of influencing situations and attitudes. What we call a good design is one which achieves integrity – that is, unity or wholeness – in balanced relation to its environment.
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
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