She held the pages loosely in her fingers. I watched as her eyes moved left to right and rapidly down the page. A smile crinkled at the corners of her mouth. I knew she had reached the sentence I had agonized over, crossed out, thrown away and resurrected.

We write for that moment, the deepest kind of connection. When one of our thoughts become one with somebody else's. We also write to explore ourselves, to defy the principle of conservation of matter and create something out of nothing. An English teacher I had in high school introduced me to free writing. This is a technique in which one tries to clear his or her mind and then just write whatever happens to come into it as rapidly as possible. The experience can be fascinating and disconcerting. Although I no longer practice free writing, it taught me that our minds are more than just the cumulative sum of our experience and externally imposed attitudes. Our minds can create thoughts, images, and concepts that are completely new, with no bearing on our experiences.

Writing is an act of creation almost as miraculous as child birth. While the words themselves are static once committed to paper or electronic storage, they remain a powerful catalyst that once introduced to another mind can create something neither the writer nor the reader could ever have imagined: Something out of nothing. We write to connect, to create, to explore.

Learn more about this author, B. W. Follett.
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