Writing is not primarily a sensual medium or art form. Music, for instance, strikes the ear first and is only later 'translated' from its sensual first impressions into something else. Painting or sculpture introduce themselves first as material objects which can be touched and studied, in which color, shape, size, form a sensual impression. Writing is something else altogether; something big and miraculous happens before one can gain a sensual impression from writing. I'm reminded of film director Luis Bunuel's observation that, in watching a film in the theatre, the audience spends half of its time in the dark (that is, in the flicker between the frames as they pass through the projector. Mostly, we watch films differently these days.). This, 'spending half our time in the dark', is not a romantic notion but a physical fact, and for me is analogous to what happens in the moment of reading.

In reading the reader MUST supply at least a part of the experience. No matter how well a situation or a character, or a concept, is described, the reader must build this picture in his own mind in a completely different way than if he were watching a film of the same material or listening to a lecture. The act of reading is active and immersive in a completely different way than most other arts.

Compression is an absolute tenet of writing and has been since before the arising of the term. Compression in writing attempts to reduce experience to patterns which are incomplete enough to allow the reader personal access to them, not as concepts but as experience. In writing, one is always trying to find the circumstance or the character or situation which can hold as much information as possible, of itself, so that one can then strip away all else. So that a text becomes as much about what has been left out, or abandoned, as the remaining elements. For some writers, this practice still contains the holographic sense mentioned in the article below; in the belief that a well-developed scene or character or moment in a piece, even when removed from the work in the editing process, retains a resonance with the final work, that is, its shadow still lies over the pages even though it has disappeared.

In writing fiction, it is sometimes necessary to write long sections or chapters of a character's experience, which you know will never be used in the final work, simply in order to make it real; to create it as an invisible adjunct to the finished piece. Strangely, it is sometimes not enough to simply 'think through' this event in a character's life, it must be written in order to somehow become a part of the completed work.

Primary decisions concerning a piece play hugely important roles because they are a way of making decisions about how to compress information. What is the time frame of the story? How many characters are important? What is the structure of the piece? These decisions allow the writer to build in hidden information which often only becomes apparent by the absence of other information, that is, why do I learn so much about this character, but another character has only a single sentence devoted to them? Compression also plays a part in the juxtaposition of scenes and the manner in which one scene follows another or, doesn't follow another, being broken up and interspersed with other events.

One understands, in writing, in reading, that words are not a solely linear process one following the other like a mathematical equation which produces a result. Words are personally associative, culturally associative, and they are associative within the work itself, so that one might learn, in the course of a novel, that a certain shade of blue has a particular meaning for the protagonist, and every reference to the color sparks an association within the reading of the work itself. Writing creates gaps, and the best writers create the best gaps, by presenting us, as readers, with a framework which we must make whole.

Writers have the need to reduce and reduce and reduce, to pare the story or the novel down to its necessaries, to compress experience into single words, phrases, sentences. Writers know the pain of the single wrong word in the sentence, the single word which prevents the sentence from unfolding or, the single word, which when found, allows the sentence to become larger than itself, to unpack into a thought or an image or a feeling which, by all rights, it should be impossible to encode within a sentence. There is the dream of the homeopathic novel, so small so slight, yet which contains the explosive essence.

This essence, that which the author talks about below, finds its best expression for me, as a unique act of observation. The 'essence in my mind out of which this document flows' is, for me, the act of seeing a something, an expression, a pattern, a moment of beauty, which is personal and yet not personal, subjective yet not subjective; perhaps, I think as I write this, it is a 'seeing' from a place in which minds might meet. My job as a writer is to be as committed to that perception and its act of seeing as I can possibly be, to encode as much of that experience into a single sentence as I can manage. My job as a reader is, not only to decode the author's act of seeing from the text before me, but to meet it halfway. Not to settle for a simple description of the moment or process, but to allow myself to be drawn in by it, changed by it.

The miracle of writing, as such, is that this 'seed' or 'essence' does manage to make its way across the paper and the words and all spaces between to take up root in another human being. And, in the best circumstances, it has already been modified by the time it takes root in the reader, by the act of reading, by the unique interaction of the reader with the text. So that, in the best of circumstances, the author does not simply move or replicate that essence, AS AN OBJECT (here a secondary question about whether an essence can even be an object), from one mind to the next, but initiates a process which allows the nurturing of an essence with the reader. And when you think about it, that's a fucking miracle.