19. Heraclitus, Teleportation, and the 3 Writing Muscles
Plus an exercise
1. Heraclitus
I was not a very good student. I had trouble paying attention. Fortunately, annoying things never failed to hook my attention.
I remember hearing the professor say during one philosophy class, "You're literally a different person every day."
And it irritated me.
Usually, when something gets beneath your skin like that, it means there's an opportunity for growth.
I disagreed with his statement. Young Stephen was not perturbed by the fact that it was a sentiment echoed by many brilliant philosophers, notably Heraclitus (with "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man"). I was not being arrogantly ignorant, damn you, I was right.
I believed in a consistent self.
"If there's no consistency of identity, there's no standpoint for perception," I said.
I wish I could say that the professor and I engaged in hearty dialectic to express our love of wisdom, but the class atmosphere was fearful, and everyone seemed to always agree with the professor without question. My attempt to offer a different perspective only led to a general hubbub, and I was left alone in my position.
My position: Of course, I agreed that life is in constant flux, and that means I am always changing. But my identity—my essence—I thought it was total rubbish to say that changed from moment to moment.
Because, anyway, what’s a “moment?”
I don’t equate my identity with my thinking process. "Cogito ergo sum" ain’t so.
2. Teleportation
I’m fascinated that we maintain a sense of unity in our identity, despite the inherent mystery of its constant flux.
I mean, teleportation is a cool idea, like Star Trek’s "Beam me up, Scotty," but if I think about it too deeply, it brings existential dread.
Because when you step into the teleportation chamber, it evaporates and reconstitutes you somewhere else.
It's not like walking through a hallway.
The thing vaporizes you. Maybe for good. A few seconds later, a different machine produces a replica of the life form it just vaporized.
What if that consciousness is not the same consciousness but a doppelganger?
How would you know? How would anyone know?
If there’s no consistency of consciousness, then the prospect of teleportation being the same thing as suicide-and-replication wouldn’t bother you.
But then, don’t you want it to be you who is living your life?
I see my writing process as a way of engaging the space between thinking, feeling, and self.
As I write, I train three “muscles.” Being conscious of these muscles helps me be more intentional in my practice at various stages.
3. The 3 Writing Muscles
The Muscle of Creation
This is the most important muscle. Build it, and you'll also build the others.
This muscle gets a workout by having a regular writing practice.
Show up regularly. Put in the time. Be devoted to the process above and beyond the expectation of the “output.”
Action + intent.
Nothing can happen if you don't stoke the creative fire.
Time spent in raw generation and creation changes your identity. You become a creative person the more you practice the act of creation.
You develop a relationship with the process. Your sense of self gets shaped by this relationship.
Ideas show up more readily when you're working than when you’re stuck in your head.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
- Pablo Picasso
In Deep Freewriting, I embrace this devotional approach to the writing process and try to offer as many exercises and ways of putting it into practice as possible. I didn’t want it to be a book on creativity that just talks about the creative process; I wanted readers to actually get stuff done.
The Muscle of Structure
Writers put themselves in two camps - plotters and pantsers. Plotters work things out beforehand. They build the world, the plot, the characters, and then they write.
Pantsers need to discover the story as they write it. They write from the seat of their pants.
I’m a bit in between these. I like to know the big picture, but even if I decide everything beforehand, I am going to make discoveries during the writing process that will change my preconceived notions about the story. That’s why I work with structure by sketching.
I wrote a post on X recently about how I like sketching with words. I write to discover key points to expand on later.
It’s important to honor wherever you fall into the spectrum of structure. I tried both extremes, and neither way worked for me. I needed to develop my own way. Now I feel more comfortable about organizing pieces of writing. Through practice, I built that muscle and discovered myself in the process.
The Muscle of Revision
Good writers are good at editing and revising.
There’s wisdom in embracing shitty first drafts.
Revision sharpens your focus.
Revision demands that you re-enter the stream of written thoughts, feel the moments once more, and determine, “Ah, no - this is how it wants to go.”
Revision is not about making corrections. Revision is the ability to re-see, re-feel, and re-enter. To honor what’s most alive about something that may be deeply flawed.
I’ll conclude this post with an exercise from Deep Freewriting that illustrates what I find wonderful about revision.
Exercise: Turning A Phrase
One of the challenges with writing is when you have the feeling that things could be said better yet you can't quite see an opening. The writing feels locked down. It becomes hard to discern how they could be said any better.
Maybe you feel like "Well, I said it, and there's nothing more I know how to say about it." Saying it again would only be to repeat yourself.
This exercise helps demonstrate how much it matters the way something gets written. It's not as if you can write something in two different ways and it won't make a difference. The way something gets written is everything.
It can prove a useful exercise to experiment with rapidly restating the same thing in different ways.
Bring your attention to the way things get said. Notice the parts, the elements, and the causes of the effects. Notice the verbs and pronouns, whether they are abstract or concrete, experiment with techniques like repetition, turns, shifts of beginning and ending.
And then write something.
And then write it again a different way.
You're giving yourself options and you're also seeing other sides to the simple thing you wrote in the first place.
For an example, I'll start with a simple sentence:
A man walks down the street.
The phrase might be taken as it is, literally, or it could be received as an image or symbol. Perhaps we see this image as a metaphor for life as well. It resonates with us in that way. And, in a small way, we wonder who the man is, where he came from, where he’s going, whether what he carries with him is helping him along.
We can also look at the shape of the thought and think of it poetically in that way. As a shaped thought, it’s pretty straightforward; plainly spoken. It’s functioning in language in as about a fundamental way as it can. This language is also going somewhere — it does not expect us to slow down and examine the way that the phrase has been laid out.
Going, going, going, the man on the street.
The phrase begins with action — action absent a subject. It takes itself as the subject for the time-being, and we suspend comprehension of all else. The action of going is mixed with the word’s repetition, and when we at last come to the man on the street, his figure is mixed in — it’s his whirlwind of action.
That man and his walk!
Here we sense the individuation of the man against other potential men potentially walking. The speaker is remarking about a particular man, and in the remark we get a sense of the speaker’s individuation as well. We wonder who this person is that he or she reacts in such a way to the walking man. I’m not really changing the information so much as playing with the free space offered by language. It’s there; we don’t often see how much wiggle room there truly is, because most of the time we seek to convey meaning with the shapes of our thoughts. We are simply getting from point A to point Z.
Once, there was a man who walked down the street.
I love the way this phrasing signifies the beginning of a tale. From thin air, a claim is conjured: Once, such-and-such happened. Once, so-and-so existed. There’s something about the removal of the word Once that makes its claim so different than, for example, simply mentioning it: A man walked down the street. The words invite the reader to imagine a parallel space, perhaps in the past — and certainly again in this moment of retelling.
The street had a man walking down it.
Here, the focus is on the street. The man is really just a passing thing, and what’s significant is the street, or perhaps the fact that a man was walking on it. Maybe it is a dead-end street, or a street where only women walk.
A man walks uphill down the street.
This sentence shows something peculiar in the telling. It draws our attention to the man and his actions, but primarily we’re hung up on why it was phrased that way. This kind of play had better pay off for the reader, because it takes work that distracts us from the feeling that we’re going somewhere.
It was a man that walked down the street.
This could be a factual interpretation of the street scene. Just prior to this statement, something must have happened that called into question the gender or manliness of the figure on the street. I’m inclined to read into this phrase beyond the literal distinction from man/not-man and ascribe to the man a kind of Dirty Harry swagger.
Compare it to a similarly constructed sentence:
It was a street that the man was walking on.
Here the speaker is creating the possibility that men can walk on many things: airplane wings, chairs, blades of grass.
Well, a man is walking down the street, after all.
Here we get an image of the world in which the street and the man live. The speaker seems reluctant or dubious about someone walking down the street. Was it too dark? Dangerous? Is the speaker concerned that he/she is alone? Was a house robbed? Why is the speaker seemingly relieved to notice something so commonplace?
It’s just a man walking down the street.
Here’s a phrase we too often imply internally when we’re searching for ideas. We’re saying that it’s nothing more. As a statement, of course, it’s fine, it serves a purpose, it keeps our attention earthbound.
Let’s see what happens when drawing attention to this language. A good way to draw more attention to something as writers is to spend more time with it in writing, consciously returning to the insistent word “just” whenever possible:
It’s just a man walking down the street. He’s just walking. He’s doing what you’d expect, and not doing anything besides going down the street. He’s just a normal man. It’s just a normal street. People walk on streets. This man is doing just that.
When I write resolutely this way, as a writer, I’m inclined to see the insistence as a kind of pressure cooker. I’m inclined to say what is not happening:
It’s not like he’s stolen your wallet. He’s just walking like anyone else would walk. He’s not a stuffed dummy; he’s walking down the street. Go ahead and look if you don’t believe me. See, it’s just a man – it’s not a whole parade of people even though you keep saying it sounds like that.
Note to Writers
If you’re working on a book and you’d like help during the process, reach out to me.
I open my schedule each month to work with a few writers as a writing coach.
We can work together for a single month or as many months as it takes to complete your project.
I love helping people finish what they start.