More adventures in Gchat:
me: hmmm. I just googled “intellectual ADD” and got no results, “creative ADD” had a few
Michael: What do you mean?
me: well, I have this issue, where whenever I start thinking about something, my mind maps out all the other obscure things that are associated with it.
Like, if I think, watermelon, then I also start to wonder if those square watermelons are real, and then also that there was this book I wanted to read called Watermelon Sugar, and then also that you can fill one with alcohol and place it in the sun.
So, I really just wanted to think about watermelon, but there’s about 5 other tangents that are worth pursuing.
So, how do I do that in writing?
Emily Dickinson used to do this cool thing on her manuscripts where when she wasn’t sure of a word she would put a + above it, then stack all the alternative words above that or, if there were too many, make a footnote of them.
I feel like that all the time, but haven’t figured out how to express that in writing. Blogging could work well because I could link out to those things, but that wouldn’t really make sense to a reader without any introduction.
Michael: What do you mean, that’s what links are for?
me: what?
Michael: To link to other things!
Right?
me: I mean, if I wrote: “I was thinking about watermelon, and then I ate one and it was fucking delicious.” There are three unrelated watermelon thoughts that I would like to somehow rope in. Can’t link the word watermelon to all of them. I need, like, a mind map.
Michael: There is mind mapping software.
But I don’t know how you do that in a blog.
me: Yeah
I need to represent it somehow
Michael: You’d have to write a WordPress plugin to help you.
me: I guess I could
hmm
Maybe that could be the blog, a mind map image
that’s kind of a cool idea.
Tags: ideas about creativity, ideas about the internet, ideas about writing well