Writing is a window to the soul.
Keep reading to explore this idea, then leave a comment to join this dialogue. And see today's Community Notes for a surprise :) [This post is from the Archive.]
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If you want to know someone’s true personality, who they are when no one is looking, who they really long to be deep down in their soul, have them write a poem about nature or a scene in a play based on someone they have admired and lost or a journal entry about their childhood crush and their recent romantic relationship juxtaposed. Or, better yet, have them write an open letter to the public at large regarding the current state of the world and all its people and their daily affairs and make-shift homes.
Have you decided what they, what you, should write yet, will write yet? Or is it too much to read?
Because you will learn all you need to know about what writers value and despise from their lines, from the adjectives they use to describe places and times, as well as the verbs and pronouns they intentionally omit or include. You will be able to deduce their biggest regrets, their greatest fears and dreams and what they doubt and profoundly believe. You will also know what and who they hold close and keep at bay, and all their darker tendencies tailor-made to deceive and be deceived. But only temporarily. And always in retrospect. Because what is written has been written. And what will be written doesn’t exist yet. Though they are intrinsically entangled.
You see?
The soul of a writer is in what they have written, but what they have written is only a past snapshot of a tiny piece of their unceasingly unfolding identity over time. Even long after their body dies, their words live on and create a life of their own. And so, their writing takes on a soul of its own, to which the writer is forever attached and detached at the same time somehow.
A piece of writing is but an ephemeral window to a writer’s soul as it was, as its physical form in the real world will outlive both its creator’s and long string of possessors’, especially with the invention of the cloud. That is, however, only if it ever came alive long enough to disturb and stir another writer’s world and soul to be possessed enough to create and put pen to page themselves.
Via this symbiotic tradition, a piece of writing’s meaning will always be derived from those who are reading it, using it for their own purposes when and where they are, while that living writing that moves and inspires again and again remains transfixed in a time and place not their own, before that writing soul they’re attempting to capture and see on the page and screen continues to evolve and shift and change on its own journey. Beyond the scope of known temporality and words, ironically.
So yes, essentially, a piece of writing is a window to both the writer’s and the reader’s soul, forever changing shape and simultaneously holding stimulating, life-giving qualities that transcend time and space, in tandem.
Today’s Dialogue
Do you agree that writing is a window to the soul? Why or why not?
© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
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