Art is Language... (Art)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, July 02, 2009, 06:20 (5622 days ago) @ dhw

I don't know why my posts continuously never seem to make it in this thread. - Your question is best directed at intuition... I write myself, and I write a psych profile for my characters, and I let my intuition take over after I internalize it. This is similar to method acting, and this is something I bet many authors do (in an unstructured way.) - I think we have different definitions of what someone "knows." You seem to interpret this as me saying, "only what one has experienced." Maybe in some regards this is true, but its not what I'm getting at. - There are limits to what a person can think of. In my own life, I can think of nothing I've ever thought of that didn't have precedent somewhere else. Shakespeare thought of faeries, because he knew of Celtic myth. - Robert Louis Stevenson probably can lay the best claim to writing "what he didn't know," in that his stories were acted out in his dreams by "little people." He just wrote down the stories. - But none of his stories are beyond the believability of his time. - Even Tolkien's stories are largely grounded in Celtic and Nordic myth. The original stories were almost invariably depictions of nature. - So I see literature as a grand "revision." All of the original ideas, have already been thought... all of the basic motifs exist now that ever have: Man v. nature, man v. self, and man v. man. - Though even my hallowed Nietzsche balked at placing limits upon Man... I say that such limits indeed exist. - I just wish it wasn't true.