A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Ninety
I am thinking a great deal about language, and exploring my suspicion that the general view that language is primarily about interpersonal communication is wrong. I tend to believe that the first function of language is intrapersonal mediation. By this, I mean that language first functions as a medium for interpreting and categorizing experiences. I am not certain how to explain this fully, let alone unpacking it and what it means for me as a writer, but I think that I approach writing differently when I consider things from this vantage. This may only be my experience, but when I consider language from the traditional perspective, I write just to tell the reader, to communicate with the language itself, but when I think in the second way, I think of the language as something else, not just a tool of communication but a method for creating an experience. It is more like writing a script to be directed and made into a play by others, but those others are the unconscious faculties of a reader. I doubt this makes coherent sense yet, but that is why I am still exploring and unpacking these ideas.
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