First of all, I’m not exactly sure where I’m supposed to put any/ everything on this page. Is this the place for the response to Weds class? Also, this is Carrie.
Second of all, I’m sorry I’m late to this party. My sixteen year old cat is dying. I’m distraught and more absent-minded than usual.
But anyhow, I have been thinking about what writing is/ isn’t kind of a lot these days, and wondering, too, if it matters. Of course, once you get down to it, everything is impossible to define, words are approximations and sometimes bad ones and my definition of writing and yours are probably not the same. That said, it can be helpful to have a working definition, so I’ve been wondering– what am *I* doing when *I* write? I feel like I need to define that before I get started with defining the big capital “W” writing as a whole. What is writing, the verb, to me? (The noun strikes me as even harder to define– an artifact after the fact– perhaps proof that writing has been done, but there’s so much we don’t know about the space between act and object.)
Anyway, I realized that the one thing I need need to write is my hands. I suppose that if I lost both of them, I might find some way to write anyway, but as it stands, I can’t write on voice recognition or google glasses. So I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that, for me, writing is tactile. For me, writing is making words, or the mark of words with my hands. There’s more to it, I suppose, like “making sense” or stringing together ideas, but I don’t know, if I type the word “potato” for no reason, I’m still writing, I think. Of course, we can problematize this (as we can problematize anything) further by asking “what are words?” But this mark-making definition gives me great pleasure, because I like making THINGS. I studied sculpture. I like to build. I like to have something to hold. I want, more than anything, for writing to be physical, which might be why I got that standing desk. I like books as objects as much as I like books as thoughts, maybe more. I like to hold things and to touch things and so I like stories as records of physical activity– the object arising from the act.
What’s my question? I don’t know. I suppose my question is why we need to define writing, knowing full well that we never will? The question isn’t meant to be petulant– I like this kind of conversation as much as anyone, but I wonder at our need to at once narrow down a definition and destroy that definition with the same hand. There actually might be something here about writing as a simultaneous act of building and destroying, but I don’t know.
