BeaverCraft


Writing as telepathy

Stephen King wrote a wonderful little piece about What Writing Is:

Telepathy, of course. It’s amusing when you stop to think about it—for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J. B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time its been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe’s Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but even if I am we may as well stick with writing, since it’s what we came here to think and talk about.

It's more than a metaphor; the tools of language and writing are an extension and enhancement of our minds. And modern telecomunication tools have in a real sense extended our perception, giving us something akin to the ESP of fiction - the ability to precieve events and thoughts at a distance. Future technology will only enhance that ability. It's not exactly the same as the telepathy of fiction, but what imagined technology ever totally matches our predictions?

I bring this up because a lot of my writing is lost to the ether of some forum or Facebook post, instead of being perserved on something I can control (my website). I've also been binging on eBooks and other electronic reading, and I've got an itching to create some pure-text content. We'll see how it goes.