BEGIN IN THE MIDDLE
The how-ness of writing often remains unseen to all but the writer, for the act of writing can be a highly solitary, even secretive, affair. Writing can seem a duplicitous art for its sentences work to smooth words towards organised flows and sequential rhythms that once written appear as though they have always been as such. Yet the process of writing is often circuitous or discontinuous, not linear. The process of writing begins before knowing where it will lead. Beginning without knowing the end, writing begins in the middle. The beginning of a text is rarely located in the first word much as the ending is unlikely to be the last. A beginning is often arrived at and not departed from. One beginning is absorbed or displaced by another, in writing’s waves of endless starting over. The time that it takes to write the words is condensed into the space that they occupy once ordered into line. The process of writing pulls liquid thinking towards the brink of thought, where it is coaxed further still towards the shape of letters congealing across the page. Writing follows, it strives to keep up, stay with, remain in touch. Alternatively, maybe it is the act of writing itself that calls for thought. Writing-in-formation, not writing as information. Towards the fallowing of language, where words can rest at times, for emergent thought to seed and grow. Letters can be followed into the appearance of a word. Language gives and a sentence appears. Yet in becoming concrete, the process of thinking-writing might lose something of its flow or fluidity, for there is always something surplus that fails to be translated, that resists materialisation into definitive form. The act of writing (verb) somehow always escapes writing (noun), as thinking escapes thought, as knowing escapes knowledge. The wrestle of how the words got there will soon be forgotten.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)