I’ve written before about the process that takes place when I write: how the writing simply appears.
My writing?
I call it “my writing.” but is it? How could it be “mine” when “I” didn’t do it? I sat and invited it, and it appeared.
“Well,” you might say, “you had to sit your body down for it to appear. You had to open your computer. You had fingers on the keyboard and allow your fingers to type the words that come. If you had not done these things, the writing would not have appeared.”
“Perhaps,” say, “but why call it ‘mine?”.
Perhaps there’s a reason. I call it mine, not for my own benefit, but for the benefit of others.
Quality writing
There’s a lot of writing out there. Some is good. Some is not. The difference, as I wrote, is Quality.
The writing that appears in front of me has a certain Quality. It the initial Quality is not sufficient, then I decide not to accept it and decide to wait for something closer to the Quality that I want to arrive.
The writing that appears in front of other people (or that “they” might say that “they” “write”) has a different Quality. So to label some writing as “Mike’ Wolf’s writing” is to say that it has the kinds of Quality associated with other “Mike Wolf” writing.
I’ll go with calling it “my writing” if only for that purpose. But I didn’t write it. I just filtered it for Quality.
Are congratulations due?
“Then I shouldn’t ever congratulate you on a good piece of writing, or an especially thought-provoking idea,” you might have said.
Indeed, you would certainly have said it if your name had happened to have been Daniel, and you had been chatting with me about this in a Hangouts channel.
“You can congratulate me,” I might have and did reply. “I did sit down. I did tune in. I did decide what had enough Quality and what did not. It’s like congratulating the head of a publishing company for the kinds of books it publishes, or the head of a record label for the music they put out. You can do that.”
“The fact that I don’t do the writing doesn’t mean I have no part in its creation. I’m essential. But just not in the way you might think.
That’s what happened here.
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