Re: slow writer (with trophy)
i respond: well, no, actually. i mean of course there is adrenaline, but to imply that that is the cause of the progressive acceleration during my writing process is to put the cart before the horse. what i described here really feels key:
"but then...i can see it. i see how it's all going to come together, i see beyond my nose and all the way down the street. the text to come is so obvious, it simply falls out of what i’ve already written."
of course adrenaline becomes a part of this, particularly as i become increasingly menaced by a deadline, but the image i have is that i plod forward little by little until i reach a point where what i've written suddenly begins to tell me exactly where to go next, and further all the way through to the end. it's like suddenly the entire text appears in my brain and all i have to do is "dictate" it to my fingertips. i hurry because of the deadline, because of the adrenaline, because it is thrilling (evanescent thoughts of "i'm a genius!"), and because of the possibility that this text in my brain might disappear before i can get it all down.
diotima,
I've been following this thread and not really been able to grasp what the issue was. But now it is clear.
What you are describing is a phenomenon that has been written about by any number of people for at least the last 300 years.
Typically we think of it in terms of epiphanic insight into a puzzle or problem. You stare at the puzzle pieces--the facts you know, the relationships between the facts that you can't quite put your finger on, the ideas other people have expressed--until they've embedded themselves in the deepest recesses of your mind. Then you give up and don't think about them for some period of time. Perhaps you go for a hike or play a game of tennis or just have a dram of Pernod and fall asleep. Next thing you know, a fully formed scientific theory pops into your head and you've nothing left to do but dash to your desk, sharpen your pen, and begin furiously scribbling equations.
In your case, the process isn't quite so dramatic, because the puzzle you are solving--how to organize concepts into a readable document--is fairly straightforward. Instead of Eureka!, you have Okay, it's beginning to make sense to me now. But I think the underlying neurological mechanism is the same as that written about by Henri Poincaré, Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Max Ernst, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Moore, William Wordsworth, Carl Jung, and many others. We all go through it, but most people don't sense it--or at least don't express it--so much in terms of starting slowly and accelerating.
The book I'd recommend is _The Creative Process,_ Edited by Brewster Ghiselin. It is a compilation of essays by those listed above and a large number of others, all making the same general point. I just dug around and found my paperback copy from 1964, cover price sixty cents; but I see that Amazon is selling a new edition, too (with the old edition still available used, at prices that begin at one cent).
Dick
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