In a sense, you don’t brainstorm. The universe launches a storm inside your brain.
You see things in life, just like everyone does. And all of the things you see and hear and read are little bits of sparkling hot water, like steamy ideas. At night, as you dream, and in the day, the cacophony of worldly worries and fears collect and thicken the air with their dusty particles. The thoughts and ideas merge and fuse, and become something else entirely, something almost tangible.
When you write, it’s because something in your heart has condensed, and is rising up within you, beating itself against your skin. The silent thunder of your conscious fills your mind and ears. Inside you there is a relentless pressure, and all around you there is room to write. So the ideas spill out and down, down, down fall the little drops of water.
They patter on the muddy ground of your imagination. They collect into puddles. The rain continues to fall. Sometimes moss beings to grow. But you must not be content to let this happen. You must take the water and your rain drenched soil, and make a path for the water to run. Carve a line in your mind where the thoughts can flow. And then, when the inspiration is pouring down inside you, it can form a mighty river; a life giving water source.
First you must form the rivulets and then you must learn to control the unpredictably wild water. Sometimes it comes down the side of a steep mountain fast and hard and loud. Other times it’s small and silent as it fills puddles on a woodland floor. But your imagination is where your river will start, and that’s where you must begin, wherever the rain is falling; wherever your thoughts are flowing.
And then you gather more thoughts, and more sparkling words, and the glittering rainwater rushes into the path that you have made, into the story that you have begun to tell. Soon there is no choice but to move forward and nothing can stop the ideas. They tumble out and down splashing over every thought and action, into valleys and going deep into the ground.
Of course, no water is perfect without some sort of revision, some sort of purification system. Place rocks in your streams; take your story deep under ground. Let it try many paths and never be content to let it sit in one place. And then, when the time is right, let your story-river flow out of your mind. Let it turn into smooth, black ink. Write. Let the world thrive on the water that formed in your mind.
Remember that your words will also give their life-sustaining water to you. And whether you intend it to or not, your words will become what you are. Their permeating abilities extend far beyond anyone else’s, but not necessarily because they came from inside you.
You are not an author the same way the sky doesn’t create the rain; the way the ground doesn’t supply the water. The rain is made from the steam and the dust that comes from all over the world. The words you use are made from ideas and thoughts that come from everything around you. Then, deep inside your heart, they form dark, heavy clouds. They pour out onto your imagination and give water to your rivers. You, my fellow writer, are not the rain. You are the sky, the ground, the channels through which the world desires to speak, but you are not the rain.
Often writers become confused and think that their words are truly their creations, and they become prideful of their abilities. They think that they are invincible wordsmiths, forging sharp weapons or delicate jewelry from ink and their own ideas. But you must never let yourself think this. When you allow yourself to believe you are the one responsible for the fantastic inspiration behind your words, you will fail.
Too many talented writers forget that the words they write do not come from them. They try to write something good with no inspiration. They get “writer’s block.” But all they must do is remember and open their eyes to the rising steam, to the ideas swirling around them. They must learn to forget the notion that they can invent their own salvation.
In order to write something that will be worth reading, you must have inspiration worth writing. You will find the more you open your eyes to the world around you, the more you will see and the more you will have to say. But if you moor yourself away from the beauty of the Earth, and expect to be inspired, your readers will see only boney paper; lifeless, dead, disconnected. When you can loose the blindfold that blocks humanity from seeing the desert around them, when you feel the paper-dry dirt and you long to fill it with the rain from your river, then you can write. And when you sift your words through the rocky revising process, you enable the world to understand your thoughts more clearly. Your water becomes clean and pure and the universe will be able to understand. Then you will write well.
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