I'm a compulsive writer. If you look through my things, you'll find scribbles on everything, from the last-page-of notebook standard student fare to obscurely named .txt files in odd places on my PC (both work and home!). And this despite the fact that I have a diary, several close friends' as sounding boards, an organizer, a blog and a webpage on writing.com! When a friend decided to format her comp, I actually had to pick up 3 pieces of writing I'd left on her comp!
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My point is this. A person's thoughts are so concurrently varied, fleeting and amoebic, its impossible to encapsulate them. some of the potentially best pieces of our writing remain unwritten. Simply because the first line, captured vividly as we see something on a bus ride home, gets morphed into something much plainer by the time we reach, or sometimes, completely disappears from the mind.
If we're lucky, we'll remember the subject and may be we'll be able to capture the essence, if not the mood and flavor, later. Worse still, you're helping a friend write a statement of purpose for his MS applications and you get this spot of sheer bleeding brilliance, see, a clincher of an opening line, but at that exact moment your interactive-pedagogy-believing bugger of an instructor decides to ask you to explain the algorithm. So long UCLA.
But thankfully, there is one place yet, where, despite it never actually going down as permanent, your thoughts do reach their purpose - when you are talking to other people. When your thoughts flow fluid, with no nuance (that may have been escaped when writing) going unexpressed, when the mood makes sure that it claims its true meaning down to the last stressed syllable. I still remember a friend of mine saying to me - "(insert my name here), you know what's sad about this world? Advice is free. And no one needs a license to dole it. That's why idiots give it out and even bigger idiots don't appreciate it when its worthwhile.
That was Readers' Digest Quotable Quotes material, but she probably doesn't even remember saying it.
But I do.
And that's the point of all creative expression. That there's an audience that cares, an audience that it affects, negatively or positively. Art for the sake of it is art. Like parallel cinema that only the producers actually 'get'. But an audience turns art to writing. To artistry. To longevity. If only in the haze of a receiver's brain.