Writing: From the Mind, From the Heart

In my writing classes, I seemed to be set apart from my classmates. They wrote diary entries. I created fiction.

It never seemed to fail. The semester where one of my classmates broke up with her boyfriend, there were always stories where the narrator talks about the loss of her boyfriend. All the poems are about loss of that special someone and feeling alone.

Meanwhile, I'm writing about things that have nothing to do with my life. I'm writing poems about a lamp on a pole so high that people don't know if it produces any light. I'm writing about a man who treks across the world and up the tallest mountains to find the answers to life. I write about a woman so mentally disturbed that she sees life only in terms of nursery rhymes.

I could not stand my classmates, not even a little. They weren't creating anything, just repeating incessantly things that have already happened. They weren't telling stories, just telling events. It was boring, which was a great deterrent. I also didn't have anything about my personal life I wanted to share with other people (trust issues).

So if I didn't write about things that happened in the real world, then I had to make up a world where things happened. I basically came up with a what if situation or some random scenario, and then watched the events play out, writing down what happened. I know now that certain people call this a thought experiment. Another way to describe this is writing from the mind. It is a purely concocted story, created, developed, and written in the mind.

I've never really put stock in any other kind of writing. I have always found that writing based on real life is inherently uninteresting. It is the kind of writing that belongs in a journal or diary. It is a great exercise in catharsis, but rarely meant for other people.

And yet, some times, I am in the presence of a scene of raw humanity. It is so powerful that I know it must be captured. And I know that if I can capture it properly, everyone will know it and understand it with no need for explanation. That is when I realize that there is writing aside from the mind. That is writing from the heart, capturing a scene of pureness. It can be pure joy, sadness, beauty, confusion, or any other feeling. But it is the capturing of life, of reality, of preserving it for the ages, that is where writing from the heart derives.

I still prefer to write from the mind. I personally live in the aether, in the realm of possibilities, in the search for something I have never come across before. Writing from the mind is where those things occur the most. Ironically, because of living "out there" so much, I also thirst to truly feel pure, raw emotion. I respect any piece of writing that can make me feel instead of think.