Last Friday, I was gifted a revelation: you don’t have to draw with a pointy-tipped thing, however blunt or feathery, that makes lines.

The last drawing class I took was Art in seventh grade—and it wrecked my straight-A report card. My dad drew constantly, while we were talking, and my sister draws brilliantly too. I’ve never been able to draw to my liking, so it took a bit of courage to attend my friend Alex Alford’s life drawing session last Friday. 

I figured that, since I’m exploring imaginative intelligence, it would be good for me to try a new creative practice, one that required attention rather than imagination and demanded a skill I didn’t have. Certainly there was no possibility in my mind that I’d be able to produce anything I liked.

Well, I didn’t think it would be easy, exactly, but I never imagined it would be all-consuming for two months. Ha!

I left home on January 26, already on draft 3 of my talk after a month of work, advised by the brilliant TEDx Asheville mentors. I was confident I could present it well on stage - after all, I’ve been on stage plenty, and did a few 45-minute talks when on book tour for my memoir Love Child. So, I thought, I should be able to finish the book proposal for Imaginative Intelligence in the two months I’d be away, and maybe even finish up my book on how to write a memoir.

Ha! As I said.

One day of work on the book proposal. Zero days on the memoir book.

The talk ended up somewhere north of draft 17; that’s when I stopped numbering. And I was still rehearsing my performance at 8:30 the night before. AND I changed three parts of the talk itself at 4 o’clock that morning. (Are you surprised I didn’t sleep well?)

I’ve been told by multiple AI detectors that the first section of my memoir Love Child, published in 2009, was largely written by AI. So, since ChatGPT and the other AI writing tools were not around then, that AI must be me.

The name "Imaginative Storm" is all about being boisterous: it’s a whirlwind of images and words disrupting rationality and order. It’s messy. It’s irreverent. It’s rebellious. Instead of "write what you know," we say "write what you don't know." Instead of "try to write well," we say "don't try to write well!" And there I was, saying these things at the most highly respected writing workshop in the US.

Your eye pressed to the space between the wooden louvers that shutter the Ian Fleming Villa, you watch them: the woman as voluptuous as warm honey, the old man, thin-chested, chicken-legged, his luxuriant beard an obscene explosion of virility. She buries her face in it, then her breasts, expertly drawing her lithe body along his, careful not to rest her weight on his frail bones.

Let’s call the version your memory has settled on position, and call the other possible versions momentum. If you’re trying to pin the position of something, any momentum it has slows down—in your awareness--or even stops. Is this ringing the same bell for you that it’s ringing for me? Whenever I’ve tried to simply “write up” a memory, as accurately as possible without questioning it, it flops lifeless on the page. Zero momentum. Only when I start asking myself what I don’t know does the writing start to move.

This morning, when I told my son I'd submitted but didn't know whether I'd won yet, he remarked that it was Schrödinger's victory. In other words, at that moment I had both won and lost. When the yes-or-no answer remains to be revealed, according to Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, it's both.

Last Friday I saw KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. It's powerful, gorgeously shot, lavishly produced, and it portrays an extraordinary moment in history that hardly anybody has been aware of until now. So why didn't I come away feeling I'd seen a masterpiece? It took me a while to realize that the movie didn't affect me as it ought to have because the story is in the wrong place.

At first I didn’t realize what a horrible question it is. It even seemed kind of normal. But then my Reject button started flashing.

Quick answer: because, today included, every time I set pen to paper I discover something.

This morning I was trying to remember the name of an artist whose piece I loved in the Tate Modern, and I caught myself thinking, “There are too many artists in the world!” Which reminded me that when I was first taking myself seriously as a writer, I’d look at my bookshelves and think, “There are too many books in the world. Why do we need another?” Which was very dispiriting.