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Manics, writers, and bloggers — 23 Comments

  1. Logic and philosophy allows one to generate and maintain ideas, by attaching them to real life events, such as changing the diapers and family. This allows the ability to allow one’s subconscious to think up an idea, and then to have the conscious mind form connections in order to remember the idea and to form it into a more substantial shape.

    Then all it would need to further encapsulate the idea is to write it down. To temper it upon the anvil of concept.

  2. My biggest roadblock to being a blogger is that I think of all sorts of insightful ways to say all my wonderful original ideas, but I do it while I’m in the middle of driving, or changing a diaper, or cooking dinner. By the time I can get to a computer (or even find a pen) to write them down, my brain is completely blank. So I end up blogging about my kids and my life instead, which makes my blog incredibly boring and totally uninsightful.

  3. I have myself worked as a blacksmith, and would love to return to it under different circumstances. The one time I took one of those career selection tests, the result was that I should be a priest or minister – and I was a devout agnostic at the time.

    I’ve noticed that bloggers who display their Meyer Briggs tend to be INTPs. I don’t know if this says anything about bloggers, or if displaying ones score is an INTP thing, like the way Pisces tend not to believe in astrology.

  4. This has been really helpful. Now when people ask why I have 6 blogs (or is it 7) I can say I have ideaphoria. I took the Network test (Zondervan) and I scored very high in Wisdom, Prophecy and Administration. Blogging is a good outlet for those “gifts.”

  5. -blogs have replaced my paper note pad and fountain pen – I would sit for long periods of time, jotting thoughts, starting a story, a poem, sipping coffee, finishing some – I liked to jot and write in a cafe and had 3-4 of them that I would frequent – I always wondered if the waitress’ were jealous that I had the freedom and time to sit like that in a cafe for a couple of hours, writing, observing people, thinking, but I never dared ask them, instead I would leave them a nice tip – I miss the fountain pen, I really do – There is just something about a quality fountain pen with a fine point and the flow of ink, a satisfaction this machine does not provide, yet the flow of words is so much faster with a machine.

    I probably should have been a blacksmith and not what I am at present and not all that I have done, so many, many things in so many different places. There is something even more alive in hot iron, more so than the flow of ink. No test or vocational profile has ever shown that I am a secret blacksmith, a closet heater and pounder and shaper of iron, but I know it is true. I have seen it come alive and done some shaping but a few times in my life.

  6. “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

    The Myers-Briggs definition of an extrovert.

  7. “quite a few jokes tossed around about having mild touches of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder),”

    Not ADD? The description of mania sounds like ADD, and bi-polar and ADD overlap to some extent.

    I make notes in unpublished blog posts.

  8. My experience in the blogosphere is that 90% or more have nothing “new” to say. They simply repackage what the 10% that does have an “original” thought into something they think is important. I fall in the 90% category. neo-neocon falls in the 10% category.

    Keep up the good work. You make me want to be a better blogger!

  9. “My home, my car, my purse, my countertops, my drawers–all are littered with little scraps of paper on which are written sentence fragments, notes for posts I haven’t written yet. My guess is that that is true of most bloggers.”

    I rely on my memory for the most part, and/or search engines. Besides, I have no car (just my Harley and my truck) or purse. I’ve only been posting about once per week, but I just posted twice in one day…I might be in trouble here.

  10. As Jimmy Durante used to say:

    “And furddermore…”

    All this blogging about blogging may well bog the blogs.

    There’s not a whole lot knew in the process other than the access to a channel of distribution. Reflect for but a moment on the journaling impulse that has been with mass society since the beginning of the diaspora of the ability to read and write.

    The ability to distribute those thoughts and impulses widely is the only thing that has fundamentally changed.

    While we could not easily do so in the past, today we see not only the millions upon millions of people all over the world who wish to write and have their writings go out and go out to the world at random, we also see the tens of thousands who can write well and are worth reading made available without the filtering of the publishing company for the first time in history.

    To me, the astonishing thing at the bottom of all this is not the discovery of all those who wish to write — a few years looking over the slushpile at a major publisher will give you that notion — but the emergence of so many who do it well.

  11. Two thoughts.

    First
    On ideophoria

    I see this in myself and moreover in many of the better authors I’ve edited over the years. I think of the process as the rapid reproduction of idea hamsters. One leads to two which leads to more and more until you’ve got a vast overpopulation of idea hamsters swarming about in your cage. At that point, triage is a necessity. Unless your in the manic modality. In that case, it seems perfectly normal.

    Second
    On Writing Without Thought
    How can I know what I think until I see what I say?

  12. Odd and unusual associations, a different way of combining ideas and images; yes, these seem to be the hallmark of bloggers.

    Well, YMAR anyway.

  13. I keep all my ideas in my subconscious and lets it do all the hard work. Then I let it all out in a brainstorm post, and then I start piecing the various stuff together in a coherent whole. I find that as I write, my thinking is either on par or it starts skipping around. Only restrained by the writing itself, the need to put it into a chunk of recognizable paragraphs with an end and a beginning. It is a sort of meta-logic in which one disciplines one’s thinking through writing. The hard part was thinking while learning how to think and learning how to write. That didn’t go so well.

    This seems to be different than those who are naturally good at math. Because while it contains some of the inherent traits of mathematicians, pure logic, it also produces a learned skill similar to intuition. Meaning after you write about something long enough, you start to automatically recognize similar phenomenon, ideas, events, and actions. Thinking turns from “logic” which is linear, to “intuition” which is parallel.

    This is useful primarily for reading comprehension, but it is amazingly useful for debates and common sense reasoning.

    Neo, you’re probably actually better at foresight. What you might not be good at is intuition, which is spontaneous idea integration with known variables. You seem to write your posts and structure them, step by step, piece by piece, and learn it gradually over a time as you put a frame onto the structure and ideas.

    the test should have used concurrent testing, by using writing for both foresight and manic idea generation. But they picked artistic geometry and then did the brainstorm bit, not exactly a good baseline.

  14. What Tom Grey said 🙂

    My blog posts ARE my slips of paper. The research, links, all that good stuff, never gets done.

    But, then, I’m not a writer. I’m more of an artist. So that corpus callosum reference actually fits me better. I’m in the midst of a right-brain left-brain battle. More blogging, less art and vice versa.

    I cannot do both simultaneously.

  15. Neo,

    By the way, in your post below on “Neocons and fear” you write hardened neo-neocon Bush-loving warmonger as though that were a bad thing!

    😉

    Jamie Irons

  16. Paperboy

    You’ll have to forgive a neuropsychiatrist for noticing that you wrote:

    I channeled something telling me “this one should focus on his corpus collossum [sic], and develop it further.” Then, I had to look up corpus collossum, and what it does…

    When I think you meant corpus callosum(one s):

    The arched bridge of nervous tissue that connects the two cerebral hemispheres, allowing communication between the right and left sides of the brain.

    The misspelling or typo, however, is creative and suggestive in precisely the way that Neo’s piece points to!

    There’s perhaps something colossal about the corpus callosum. It is not merely, as the Latin suggests, in some sense “callous”!

    😉

    Neo,

    I was acquainted with Kay Redfield Jamison when she was a post-doctoral fellow, and I was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, at the UCLA Medical School. (She worked closely with one of my colleagues.) She was (and is) brilliant. At that time, she had not publicly revealed her own terrible struggle with bipolar disorder.

    Jamie Irons

  17. I thought Blog POSTS were supposed to be those scraps of paper!

    I really admire the work you put into so many of your excellent posts (Mid-long; mini-essays).

    I’m too interested in too many other flightly things most of the time.
    When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done.
    (thinking for saying, blogging for doing.)

    How does this lead to a better world? I think your changing minds essays are among the best of 2005.

  18. ok neo-neo we need an opera house in Eddington, Maine ready by mid-spring.

    LET’S ROCK…the cast for Mikado is ready

  19. Neo wrote:

    The second paragraph put me in mind of bloggers, who are of course writers first and foremost.

    Well, the good ones are, anyway.

    I too was tested at Johnson O’Connor in New York, way back when I was 18 years old. I don’t remember my ideophoria score, although I don’t think it was anything especially high. I was classified as what they called a “TMA” – Too Many Aptitudes. It means I can’t be a happy specialist – if my job is technical, I need to do additional things like music on the side. Blogging probably fits in there somewhere as well…

  20. I was supposed to be a glazier – window installer, not donut decorator – no matter how much I tried to sway the test results toward electrical engineer.

    All ghis psychobabble hurts my head. I get log-jams of ideas in my head so that I can’t get anything coherent out. I have plenty that I’d like to write about. But I don’t have notes in my purse. I do have some .txt files with notes in my computer.

    When the fatigue is too overwhelming to concentrate, I’ve started to say things like “there’s little pieces of my sanity going in and out.” Once, while I was sleep-driving the paper route, I channeled something telling me “this one should focus on his corpus collossum, and develop it further.” Then, I had to look up corpus collossum, and what it does. Then there was a show that said that women are more intuitive and emotional because their corpus collossum was more developed. So maybe I should get a purse, and start putting blog notes in it.

    Read The Holographic Universe. It’s fantastic.

  21. This blog is entertaining, but I think I have the author of the opening letter in a gramatical error of her own, or an act of laziness, or both; to wit: “… still looking to “find myself,” careerwise….”
    Unless things have changed rastically, “careerwise” is not a word. Rather, it represents a sloppy way of saying something more concise, like “…still searching for my eventual career.”

    Couldn’t resist.

    Thanks for listening; good for my ego.

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