THE WRITER'S BRAIN

The one year I taught high school, I still recall Cameron S. coming up to me after class and saying, "Mr. Thomas, you know all the big stuff, but you miss all the little things." These days, I understand that her "big" and "little" could mean different things than I imagined they did at the time, but I had thought all along that my brain seemed to extract generalizations from reading and from experience but did not accurately recall the details. I recently tried to memorize the process by which DNA via RNA makes copies of itself. The step by step drawing of the process was so simple and mechanical, anybody could understand it, but I haven't retained the details. I kick myself for this failing, yet—in kindness to myself—I do understand that had I been a teacher who taught neuroscience every day, I'd probably be more familiar with terminology. 

the brain, high on life.

Of course, the way my brain functions creates my writing style far beyond any conscious control I imagine I have over the process. However, oddly, the following passages are the opening of the second novel I ever wrote and they are rife with tiny detail. Not a generalization to be found. I'm currently translating Delinquent Lives through OCR software from typed pages to editable files. The novel is stream of conscious and darts back and forth between an adult and a boy. The adult works in a home for emotionally disturbed boys, and the boy is an "inmate" there. The plot is an X pattern which I won't  reveal for fear that no one will buy the novel when I put it out (I think) on Amazon as an e-book:
 

    1

    The Zapruder Super-8 had been hand held and shaky. Specifically, Paul remembered how the blurry blowup caught the piece of skull, hairy on the one side and bloody on the other, and the eruption of blood and fluid blown out in the spray of death. Stupidly, he imagined the fragment’s underside to be a kind of mesh material, like the underside of a toupee, and the fragment itself to be tumbling forever through black and most infinite space.
    “Oh yes,” he imagined exclaiming to others, “I can see myself traveling to the loony bin and back on a piece of bone like that!”

     2

     They walked together on a yellow afternoon in the green, city park through the small, grey, hopping birds. She held his hand. In a paper sack, he carried dry bread broken into crumbs to give them.
     “Sparrows, Jimmy,” she said and pointed.

  He threw the dry, white crumbs to them and watched them gather to feed while the heavy balloon man came down the wide, cinder path under the tall, green, high-branched trees.
     “Those are elms and hickories. See?” she told him, pointing."
     Jimmy tilted his face to their far, green tops which blotted out whole pieces of the blue sky. Then, lowering his gaze, he watched the fat, round balloon man come. He watched the red balloons wave above the round balloon man. Oh! The balloons stretched their strings tight, trying to go up.
     Sunlight splashed on everything and made an eye-hurting dazzle of everything in sight. The sun poured on the tall trees, on a brown dog far away running, on the red balloon cherries in the blue, bright sky stretching their strings. The sun splashed on her yellow hair. The sun lit the long, white hairs on the balloon man’s ears. The sun jumped and leaped from the clear, brightly-ruffled wading pool surface in a dazzle bits of light.
     “Balloons,” she said and pointed.
     “Loon! Loon!” he said and pointed too.
     When she knelt to hand him the balloon string, he smelled the soap in the dish by the white tub at home which she used only. Then he held the balloon string and tilted back his head to stare at the bright ball of red she had given him. The wind moved it. It drifted and tugged. He felt it’s life through the string and he laughed.