Writing as Listening

Not thinking about what you’re going to write next.

When I’m having a good conversation, I never quite run out of things to say.

When I’m having a bad conversation, I say cliches to fill the silence — little packets of handy filler to keep the flood of reality away. I’m not listening.

Why do I do that? There’s so much to see when looking into the face of another human being that, if you were to see all of it, you would have a seizure. Certainly, I should have something original to say about it.

I see the flash of a person out of the corner of my eye — it’s a woman in her 30s with a dog. She’s driving a Subaru. She votes blue, I instantly gather. She does yoga. She probably-oh, wait, that’s just the reflection of a tree in the window. There is no woman. What did I see? How did I create this character out of thin air? We’re doing this all the time, with people real and imagined.

We don’t see the world, we see our memories. Our minds are always collapsing the raw data of sensory information into understandable little packets that match our expectations.

At the same time, something beckons us to break out of our memory-jail. The deep spirit yearns to escape the repeating pattern of expecting something, and therefore seeing that thing, and therefore…