Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I tend to say I am a “writer and speaker kind of guy.” However, I think I have to change that, because that isn’t really correct. I am really more of a “thought organizer.”
To say one is a “writer,” well, that’s a very mechanical perspective. If you were to watch me work (on those rare occasions when it happens), you would see me typing. But that’s just a shallow visual aspect of what’s really going on. What I really do is, I take thoughts, and I organize them.
Thoughts come from all over the place. Sometimes I steal them from other people. Most of the time, I observe people doing something that does not make sense to me, and I start to do these little logic debates in my head as to why people are doing something that I don’t see any purpose in them doing. Other times, people tell me how they see the world, and this conflicts with my own experience. So I feel compelled, not just to write about my own experience, but why other people see the world differently. There is so much in the world to complain about and fix, I never run out of material.
Out of all this codification of observed apparent phenomena, patterns begin to emerge, and then one can start to apply statistical analysis. At a certain point, one can start to predict behaviors, and then you can start proposing solutions to chronic problems.
There are, of course, plenty of proposed solutions in the world, and the only way to see if they work is to test them in the laboratory. So I guess I should say, I’m not just a thought organizer, I’m also something of a experimenter and scientific observer, in that I don’t just rely upon thought organization to solve problems. Sometimes, you have to hold your breath and actually try the hypothesis, and hope the whole place doesn’t blow up in the process.
When I was much younger, I knew deep in my heart that I wanted to be “a writer.” But I knew deeper in my heart that I really didn’t have very much to write about. Now that I have experiences to write about, I suppose I should call myself an “experience analyzer and sharer, via visual and sonic verbal media.”
Hmmm . . . on second thought, I’m not sure that’s going to work. Pardon me while I go organize my thoughts.
© Justin Locke
