The Inspiration of Insanity

"Writers just write."

That's what many people say; that writer's aren't special. Anyone can stream of consciousness their way through a piece and create something. While that is technically true, most times that writing sits there, lifeless as a wet sock.

I do not write wet socks.

Neither do most of the folks that I know who write. Being a writer isn't just about the physical act of putting words onto a screen or paper. It's about Divine level creation; taking the world in your head and articulating it in such a way that you transport someone else there and, more importantly, you make them believe in it. You make them care about your people, their struggles, the meaning of the piece.

Writing is psychic projection, it's telekinetic, it's an act of celestial transference that forces your mind, your will, your point of view into the head of another. And if you've done your job right, it changes them. To write well is magic.

Many writer's inevitably get the question "How do you come up with your ideas." I've seen it a hundred times in interviews. It would be an easier question to answer "How do you think? How does your brain work?" because answering the question of how one comes up with ideas discounts the very real aspect of writing that anyone who has experienced it will agree is nothing short of a miracle. I call it, the Inspiration of Insanity.

I want to make it clear that I do not discount any mental illness. I come with the baggage of an alphabet soup of diagnosis acronyms. So what. As my Grandmother used to tell me "The only true mental illness is one you cannot use productively." While it may seem that she was being dismissive, I see her perspective as encouraging. Claiming your brain glitches as a superpower instead of kryptonite.

What does that have to do with writing? Simple. Brain glitches give you a different perspective of the world. They allow you to have a singular view of reality, a personal filter through which all experiences must pass in order to be processed. It's in the processing that the miracle happens.

That is where my inspiration comes from. Having had, literally, decades of therapy, the tools that I have been given to process my glitches give me the ability to look at my brain interpretations of my world and environment with a coldly calculating eye.

The processing part of my brain sees something and inspiration part of my brain starts twisting it on the spinning wheel of my internal interpreter, casting out a thread of something that may become a story worth telling. There are a few websites out that the offer "writing prompts" for when you get stuck creating a new piece. This process of spinning the thread is my own version of that. I have an obscene collection of little notebooks and this is what they are for; collecting those threads that may not make sense now, but down the road, may be just the piece that I need to continue a story.

Writer's write, but they also collect, they weave, they pull at the tiny strands of a spiders web of intangibles. And they give you something you have never seen before, or haven't seen in the way they are telling you. They give you perspective, they give you motivation, they give you something your brain, your filters, your own alphabet soup of glitches and experience cannot.

Be thankful for the delightful insanity that brings you our worlds, characters and things. That we, as writer's, filter and process it all for you. You get to visit, then close the book and move on.

Writers must live there.