Jeff Coleman's Blog: Jeff Coleman Writes, page 29

Why Is Imagination So Important?

This is the final installment of my four-part weekly series, Ex Nihilo.

You were born a philosopher. As a child, you spent hours beneath the stars, hypnotized by the transcendent mysteries of the cosmos. But with age came the people who told you it was time to grow up, that it was time to shed your imagination like a used skin so you could focus on more pragmatic concerns. You always secretly thought they were wrong, that you should never trade your fantasies for an ordinary life. But the wo...

Ex Nihilo, Part 3: The Rough Draft

This is part three in my four-part weekly series, Ex Nihilo, where I’ll be sharing all of the intermediate steps leading to my next blog.

Almost there.

Finally, after a ton of freewriting and brainstorming, after racking my brain for hours trying to conjure up enough relevant ideas to cobble together a blog that will hopefully interest and inspire my readers, this is where everything comes together.

I admit, I’m a little embarrassed to share an early draft with you. As I mentioned in the int...

Friday Freewrite

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

The war within myself rages on1, but today the soldiers have set their guns and their bayonettes aside to observe a day of silence.

For the first time in a thousand years, the air is still. I breathe it in, deep, full of life, remembering the boy I used to be before self-knowledge shattered the peace.

There are no mortar shells bursting in the air. There are no bullets zipping through the air, piercing holes, sapping the life blood from my ravaged psy...

Ex Nihilo, Part 2: Organization

This is part two in my four-part weekly series, Ex Nihilo, where I’ll be sharing all of the intermediate steps leading to my next blog.

Disclaimer.

Ordinarily, the steps between my freewrite and my rough draft are an indeterminate blur. I don’t sit down to write a formal outline, nor do I adhere to any specific method to get the job done. I prefer to mold my words like clay, gradually transforming bits and pieces of my freewrite and the emerging structure inside my head into a comprehensible...

Friday Freewrite

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

When it comes to art, what is the artist but a mere vessel, an empty chamber which passively receives all the many shouts of the world and magnifies them, combining them into a single echo, a convolution of existing thoughts that only seems original in its unique combination?

Einstein’s theory of relativity was incomplete. Time dilation didn’t just occur at relativistic velocities, but in moments of extreme fear and anxiety. And in these cases the ef...

Ex Nihilo, Part I: Conceptualization

This is part one in my four-part weekly series, Ex Nihilo, where I’ll be sharing all of the intermediate steps leading to my next blog.

The Idea

My blogs typically begin with a single thought, some feeling or sensation that I want to cultivate and grow. It’s not usually well defined, only an abstract vapor meandering through my mind without form or substance.

For this particular blog, I had the sense of something magical, something mystical and otherworldly, something that evoked a primal se...

Friday Freewrite

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

Redemption. Salvation. I have begun to write once more1. I’ve emerged from a fitful slumber filled with terrors and anxieties to find the light once more.

I’m reoriented. Recalibrated. The old ways have returned. The folly of my former ways is but a bad dream, a hazy recollection that might never have happened at all.

A bad dream. Then poof. Gone. I have discovered myself once more, amid a hall of mirrors and vain self images, an endless array of mirr...

Ex Nihilo, Introduction

Out of the unformed ether of the mind erupt peoples, nations, entire worlds of every kind. By unleashing the raw power of creation, we storytellers breath form and life into entire universes ex nihilo. It’s an extraordinary power, but like most practitioners of magic, we prefer to work in seclusion. We barricade ourselves in our ivory towers, huddled over parchments and keyboards in the dark, not because we’re arrogant or because, like magicians, we believe in closely guarded secrets.

Rather...

Friday Freewrite

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

Bound by rules I don’t entirely believe1, I wander through the desert in search of answers, a pursuit that surely has no resolution, no termination except in death. Loneliness is my companion. Uncertainty my consolation. I observe the lives of the others, the carefree jubilation of the ordinary things that are a part of everyday life, and I stand outside on the periphery, too turned away from the ways of the world to participate, too doubtful of my or...

Friday Freewrite

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

He’d left his old life behind1. Old habits, old places, old faces. He’d moved on, gone to somewhere far away, never to return again.

But even though he’d moved on, ghosts from his past would still visit him, haunting, asking him why he’d given them up for something new.

He’d reasoned with them, told them that nothing lasts forever, that to stagnate is to die. They’d left him, sad and doleful, but would come from time to time, hoping he’d finally retur...