Thursday, July 29, 2010

About learning : If you don't get it now...

En français
... you'll get it later.
So this morning I was in the shower, that's kind of impressive what I start thinking about when I am in there.
Anyway, so I suddenly realized something about a book that I read more than 5 or 6 years ago, about writing. Because as you all know at the moment I'm writing like a manic due to JulNoWriMo. That book's title is "Die unendliche Geschichte" or in English, "The Neverending Story".
In this story, a boy named Bastien is going to a magical world through a book but he has to create stories in this world. The only thing is that he doesn't know that each time he is creating a new story he is giving a part of himself.
I always felt like I was giving a part of myself while writing, every single one of my characters have a part of my personality or something I am interested in in them. What I discovered this morning was that you actually need to finish the story to be able to have it go out of you, just like Bastien needs to finish all the stories to be able to leave the world. I didn't understand why he had to do that, that was always something that puzzled me.

Well the real realization here is not about that really, it's about the fact that your brain is processing information from a while back. I read that book years ago but I didn't have the experience I have now as a writer back then, so stuff like that was still obscure and difficult to get. The good point is that I didn't forget, or my brain stored all that information and decided to actually process it when it had all the pieces of the puzzle.
Isn't it magical?

I means that whatever you have to learn if you can't understand all the parts right now, they will come later when you have more datas. Of course you want to know things now and to be able to use them now but there are always hided things that you can't get without time for you brain to process all the information.
Repetition can probably accelerate the process, if I had read the book several times and more deeply and if I had look at some parts of it and analyzed them in details, maybe I would have understood everything. But was it worth it to put that amount of efforts? Did I need that knowledge back then? Probably not.
Let your brain do the work for you, give it datas and let it compile them, that is the best way to have a strong knowledge of what you know.


A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. (Dune, Frank Herbert)

No comments:

Post a Comment