TALKING VS. WRITING

When you’re talking, you’re just conversing; but when you’re writing, you’re performing.  You are employing language at a higher level, with more consideration, care and craft. 

While talking happens in real time and usually addresses an auditor or more, writing happens in dream time and may be addressed to an imaginary reader or only to yourself. 

In between sentences or phrases, seconds or minutes may pass because writing is atemporal and discontinuous—it is off the clock—which allows it to be more deliberate and consciously designed even as it first emerges, but also as it is revised.

Writing is a performance to the extent that it strives to give form to the composition: to compose it, rather than blurt it, to shape and reshape its carefully deployed components, until wholeness is achieved, with all its parts in harmony. 

It does not just stop; it is finished.

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