In and through by reading

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 process of reading through the written just to see how it sounds, hangs together, says what the author wanted it to, etc. At the very least there is fiddling with the work prior to letting it declare itself born. No writer in Ayyar's catalog nor any except the most exceptional or foolhardy would pen something and release it without review into the wild and expect or want it to communicate anything worth anyone's time.

Given this thesis that there are two approaches to writing novels, clearly a form of writing intended to create moving pictures in our heads, what does this tell us about writing as a description of what and how we are supposed to visualize, or live in and through by reading? Is this dichotomy false when we drill down into the substrata?

Ayyar goes on to note that

There seems to be a separation, then, between the novel whose genesis arises from its creator’s excitement, which, channeled into a dream-like state, throws off what comes to mind in an almost automatic process, and the novel which has its development in a more intentional, cerebral decision, one in which feeling and thought are more nearly equal partners, and which conceives what it wants before it deliberately strives to fulfill that conception.

To conceive what it wants before _and after_ it deliberately strives to fulfill a conception is to say that there's half dozen of one and twelve of the other. There is not a substantive or critical difference at that point of releasing a work and moving on to the next.

Ayyar poses the question of whether or not within the writer-writing, there are two selves, one conscious and the other in flow state, as it were. Both at some point become reflective and consider what is being done and what has been done, the bi-doing of phenomenology.