Input and Output
What do you write about, and what do you write about it? What you write about—call this input. What you write about it—call that output.
You are always drinking in the world. All writing begins with that—with your five senses. You write about what you see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. And effective writing begins with seeing the world clearly—so said the English poet and craftsman John Ruskin. “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,” Ruskin said, “and thousands can think for one who can see.”
You are bombarded every moment with sensations—the sight of a cereus blossom on your morning walk, the sound of a curve-billed thrasher’s call nearby, the taste of tea lingering from breakfast, the smell of a creosote bush, the touch of a warm sweater on your arms—so many sensations that you may feel overwhelmed. Again, where do you begin?
The first step can be to focus on one sensation—to look, and to see one thing clearly, perhaps the cereus blossom.
That sensation—seeing clearly—is the first element of input.
Probably you singled out that one sensation because it aroused some feeling. What emotion did you feel? Joy, curiosity, terror, anxiety, calm, agitation? Maybe you felt joy, or a sense of loss of the wild world, or a love of the beauty of that perfect blossom.
What you feel about what you sense—that’s the second element of input.
Then, what do you think about what you felt and saw? You sensed many things, you felt many feelings, and your thoughts about what you felt and sensed are quite complex, too. Perhaps you thought something complex about a city growing up in a desert that once was wild land, about how one perfect desert wildflower has thrived in the city.
What you sense, feel, and think—that’s the input that you write about.
And, says our man Ruskin, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.”
In other words, when you write, you transform input into output.
Complementing the hierarchy of input—starting with sensations and proceeding through feelings to thoughts or ideas—there’s a hierarchy of output that moves from information to knowledge to wisdom:
Information—just the facts:
On July 16, 2003, at Tucson International Airport, it rained one inch.
Knowledge—organizing, summarizing, digesting an accumulation of information:
The one-inch rain of July 16, 2003, was the first taste of monsoon season in Tucson, Arizona.
Wisdom—an assessment of a body of knowledge, based on your own experience:
Watching the sandy soil rapidly drink up the one inch of rain, I realized what a stranger I was in the desert. I remembered the rich, green, eternally wet forests of the Smoky Mountains, my true home.
This process of input and output is an endlessly repeated sequence of feedback loops, like those fractal patterns that repeat exactly the same form from the largest to the tiniest scale.
The process applies to revising what you have written as well as to writing the first draft. For example, what do you sense, feel, and think about the way you plan to organize your piece of writing? About the sentence you have just written? The word you have just chosen?
Sense, feel, think. Information, knowledge, wisdom. Keeping this process in mind will help you remember that you are writing out of your own experience. Your own wisdom.
The one-inch rain of July 16, 2003, brought blooms to the “night blooming” cereus, a cactus of the Arizona desert. The cereus comes in a variety of shapes—a cluster of little pincushions, a spider of green spiny arms, or a green sentinel of columns standing ramrod straight, chest high. The cereus does indeed bloom at night, but just as important, it buds and blooms only after the coming of rain.
Like other desert dwellers, the cereus waits through the dry spring and the hot, dry summer for the monsoons, the summer rains. It always seems that the monsoons will never come.
At first we see clouds, but no rain. Finally, the monsoons arrive in a gush, with an inch of rain on July 16, and early on the morning of July 20, the cereus erupt in bloom. Eighteen white satin blooms on a spidery plant, two pink blooms on the little pincushions, five more white blooms on the sentinel.
A woman contemplates the magenta blooms of a potted cereus and can’t stop grinning. She has spent a lifetime learning, thinking, and writing about the healing power of desert plants, and for years she herself has been racked with arthritis. “I’m always full of pain,” she says, “but when I see something so beautiful, the pain all goes away.”