I’m a Writer, so I Link the Dots
I write to disclose connections
There are many good reasons to write. As far as I’m concerned, I write to disclose the mechanisms that life puts in place. There is a lot of curiosity behind my will to write. It deals with the specific curiosity of linking the dots and understanding the patterns.
When I notice some recurrent happening, I know that only by writing it I can understand why that is recurrently happening. A fountain pen and a sheet of paper are enough to materialize my thoughts outside of me. There is no need for any technology.
That is the pivotal point: looking at my thoughts outside me where they are free to get their logical life beyond my biases.
On the other hand, my thoughts someway mirror the experience. As a consequence, that sheet of paper above hosts the most faithful “portrait” of the piece of the world I am interested in. This is the set of dots.
Once the dots are on the table — meaning on my piece of paper — I start to either invent or detect which links could bring them together into one or more patterns. This is the most exciting phase of writing because words on the paper start creating much more information than I put into. The links are this extra information that would have never seen the light otherwise.
The magic happens because writing is putting words together, which perfectly mimics putting events together. I cannot be sure, but I suspect that humankind started thinking when it started writing. In fact, what is thinking if not linking the dots that would otherwise be isolated; they would be like pieces of a puzzle that nobody joins.
