Embracing My Brain by Kat Magendie

There are days I rail against the way my brain works. Especially if I feel it is holding me back from something I want to do as I see others do it. Math is one of those things. Being in a crowd of people is another. My writing is yet one other way. I’d always thought about the writing process as just what it was: I sit down; I write; the story comes out. When asked for the plot, I never have a quick answer. For, it seems, I do not think in plots, but instead in abstracts—my characters are abstract, the time and place and circumstance is fuzzy and furry and at a distance. It makes for good fun to write this way, for I simply have a character nudge me (and I may only see that characters eyes, mouth, hair, and I may hear them say, “This is how it is…”) and off I go. Yet, in that abstract comes traditional stories about family and friends and place and belonging—nothing really all that original. The originality is in the cracks and crevices, in the wording perhaps, or between the between.

Where I am envious of other writers is the ability to see the bigger picture, the entire world—the plot, if you will. When I ask of my brain to bring forth the bigger picture, the plot, the whole story, my brain balks, my brain splinters, my brain gives me a kaleidoscope of images flashing past so quickly that I can’t grab hold of them but one little image at a time, and I write that image down and go from there. All in all, its easier for me to just let my brain do its thing, write the story as it comes, and hope for the best. But, what would happen, I ask myself often, if I could draw out plots, if I paired my pretty good writing with a pretty good plot, and Voila~! Best seller! Ah, but alas, the same way I cannot stare at a painting, then close my eyes and picture the image but in parts and pieces and color, is the same way I cannot see my work as a whole until it is completely written.

Today, however, I have decided to embrace my brain. To be grateful for it. Surely in its way of interpreting my world, in the way it perceives data and love and lives and images and words and thoughts has served me well enough. And perhaps there are trade-offs. Perhaps if I saw in completes instead of parts, I’d not see things in the way I do, and in not seeing them in the way I do, perhaps I’d be writing plots, and in those plots I would perhaps have not met the characters who have come to me in visions of eyes, mouth, and hair. Perhaps I’d be someone else. Then I would not be me. Well. Now. There you go.