Reminds me of reading 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'. The way that book tries to get you to un-hook the judging and structuring parts of your mind so your hand can form shapes with NO WORDS to describe them.
As soon as you say 'I'm drawing an arm' your brain tries to define 'arm' and what it would mean to appropriately outline the parts of one on your paper… and the image you'd ideally produce might bear no resemblance to the 'arm' definition your brain gives you. It's an elaborate process of shutting down certain kinds of 'smart' that are overly naive and reductive, to get to images that are available but undescribable by analytical words. The perfect lines of an elbow are not 'triangle' or 'circle' or even anatomical parts: they're the image one's eye understands immediately, but getting it on paper is a whole other story.
I find when I'm live-coding audio DSP and getting close to dialing in a tonal detail that I'm trying hard to capture, or even rapidly debugging and evolving the code of the program to do it, when I'm most effective I lose the words to explain what I'm doing. It becomes 'and now I this, to do this, and then we ah… you'll see, it should… there. That.'
I'll play the sound, and my model will exactly resemble the thing I'm trying to make it sound like, but I'm miles away from being able to articulate what I did. Or, more likely, I could tell you 'I subtracted the thing and it needed to be 1.52 rather than 1.5, and that and the other idea got it to where it sounds like that. Because the filter's lower, and it's interacting with the input sample in thus and so a way'. The tangible STUFF I'm doing is rarely that complicated.
But being on the point of knowing to DO that stuff and exactly that stuff to get there… is what Graham is talking about. I don't know if it can be learned but it can damn well be trained. People as disparate as ad guy David Ogilvy, and writer John Gardner, have understood that.
And you can be a literal writer and still have important parts of your process locked away in that no-words zone. At those times, you are the writer. Your literal writing ability and vocabulary, are the stenographer. It's waiting on you having something to say. That 'something to say' may not be coming from a 'words place'.
As soon as you say 'I'm drawing an arm' your brain tries to define 'arm' and what it would mean to appropriately outline the parts of one on your paper… and the image you'd ideally produce might bear no resemblance to the 'arm' definition your brain gives you. It's an elaborate process of shutting down certain kinds of 'smart' that are overly naive and reductive, to get to images that are available but undescribable by analytical words. The perfect lines of an elbow are not 'triangle' or 'circle' or even anatomical parts: they're the image one's eye understands immediately, but getting it on paper is a whole other story.
I find when I'm live-coding audio DSP and getting close to dialing in a tonal detail that I'm trying hard to capture, or even rapidly debugging and evolving the code of the program to do it, when I'm most effective I lose the words to explain what I'm doing. It becomes 'and now I this, to do this, and then we ah… you'll see, it should… there. That.'
I'll play the sound, and my model will exactly resemble the thing I'm trying to make it sound like, but I'm miles away from being able to articulate what I did. Or, more likely, I could tell you 'I subtracted the thing and it needed to be 1.52 rather than 1.5, and that and the other idea got it to where it sounds like that. Because the filter's lower, and it's interacting with the input sample in thus and so a way'. The tangible STUFF I'm doing is rarely that complicated.
But being on the point of knowing to DO that stuff and exactly that stuff to get there… is what Graham is talking about. I don't know if it can be learned but it can damn well be trained. People as disparate as ad guy David Ogilvy, and writer John Gardner, have understood that.
And you can be a literal writer and still have important parts of your process locked away in that no-words zone. At those times, you are the writer. Your literal writing ability and vocabulary, are the stenographer. It's waiting on you having something to say. That 'something to say' may not be coming from a 'words place'.