In the paragraph below, author Robert Plotkin is saying that writing is a circular process, a feedback loop
between the mind and the words on the paper. I think the passage points
(indirectly, but compellingly) to the age-old need of the writer to just get
something down on paper. Writers often face the block of getting started, and
it may be that they feel the work should spring forth like Aphrodite from the
sea, fully formed onto the paper, when in fact the process is entirely
iterative and non-linear. This quote addresses the simple reality that putting
words on paper is an extension of our limited short-term memory and so should
be relied on for the most preliminary steps in writing, that is ruminating.(In
this light, the idea of a writer's block in getting started is a
"false" block. If one wants to complain of being blocked, the
privilege to do so is earned only after one has filled a few pages with scraps
of ideas, images, fragments, a few facts or details, phrases, simple outlines,
word lists, and so on.) The fresh piece of paper in front of the writer is
actually the key to unblocking, not the proof of a block itself.
Jeff Wyneken
Albany Middle School coach
From "The Genie in the Machine: How Computer-Automated Inventing Is Revolutionizing Law and Business," by Robert Plotkin (Stanford U. Press, 2009), p. 89