Noematics 101, an inquiry into writing as phenomenology

If "Human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is" (Sartre), then I am in movement, neither here nor there. The past does not limit or define me; the future is always not yet. Now is all that I am and it suffices and exceeds the pains of past and the riches of the future. These are never ours. They never were. We are in movement, bound by an ever-present now, each breath, each image, each second, and no more nor less. That is as it is. That is what is. That is who is. To play at other than this what-is, what-we-are, is to fail the test of living freely and feeling deeply. I thus act and know I am acting as I act. I do and am at the same moment. There is no who but I-becoming. Thus all artifacts here are past tense and over-done, future is no-thing, and only important as present to you who read or see them now. And what is left are the images in your mind, but only as long as they reside there, then they're shattered, gone, irrelevant.

To see characters such as Anna Karenina or Captain Ahab as they are, or were, or the places described in books, we are seeing what we imagine, not precisely what the author saw or imagined. But we do see images from the words that the author has provided for us to use to imagine , which often is not so much physical as trait-based. Was Anna a raving dark-eyed beauty? Was Ahab's left or right leg pegged with whalebone? Got me, but these physical incidentals are not as evocative of a person as what they thought and said and did.

Akilesh Ayyar in an article about how writers write novels on The Millions , divides their processes--as described by a number of notable authors--into roughly two novel-writer types, planners and pansters, the former premeditated and executing based on thought-through plots, characters, and so forth, the latter just letting it fly from whatever start they happen to choose. However, These divisions are not to deny the facts that writing itself constitutes a kind of planning, if only in retrospect, and that the lines between glimmering visions, developed thoughts, preparatory notes, preliminary sketches, and first drafts blur. Planners certainly do not and cannot plan everything, and even the incorrigibly spontaneous no doubt fall into certain involuntary spasms of planning. Take this a step further. Both kinds of writers, before placing the final full stop and declaring the written ready for its reader, at that end point, the final copy of the writing process, there is the finishing...