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Tara Raju's picture

Isn't that the entire idea

Isn't that the entire idea behind "writer's block"? I generally can't generate new ideas when I am concentrating on answering a prompt with extreme intensity. Some of my best papers and some of my best ideas (ha) are those that have come to me when I was at the dining hall or cleaning my room (another ha). I find that when I just let myself think about whatever topics that may come across my mind or allow whatever to just come over me I expose myself to the newest and most profound of ideas.

In class on Thursday, I finally saw the beauty in Whitman's way of writing. His words and ideas take you to a place that kind of put you in a lull, a place where everything just starts flowing and new ideas can come about. We all wanted to read Whitman outside, among nature, where we thought it was fittng. Why? I think its because nature is free place, there are no doors that close us in. We can just be.

It is that environment and that stream of unconsciousness that allows us to have the most generative ideas, to think of a new story that maybe "less wrong" than the previous one. We are allowed epiphanies in nature because there are no boundaries or confines that we can see- we can imagine and imagination is the one factor that has changed our society in absolutely unfathomable ways.

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