Making ideas

“How do you make ideas?” This was what the good daughter asked her Papa as they drove home from school. They were caught in traffic just as usual. Rather than complain they made the best use of it. They talked.

They talk about anything. It is a continuing serial-conversation. So far they’ve covered the Fibonacci sequence and how this is applied to art including writing. Leonardo Fibonacci was born in Pisa around the 1200s. He is easy to search for in the Internet. He is famous for a number sequence he devised. It is easy to derive. You start with “1”. The second number is another “1”. For the third number, just add the two previous numbers to get a “2.” Now do the same thing again with any two previous numbers to get the next number. The next number is “3.” Keep going on as far as you like: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on to infinity. This sequence is something of a root principle for classical proportion, such things as the golden section, the perfect rectangle, phi, etc.

“But how may these principles apply to practical things like writing?” As usual his Papa goes about the answer in his typical roundabout way. He goes: Suppose you wanted to make a window. What size would it be?

The Fibonacci sequence gives us a classical guide. If a window is rectangular and one of its sides is 5 feet, the other side can either be 3 feet or 8 feet. Either way the window would have a proportion that follows the sequence, at least roughly. Since it is a continuing number, the proportional relationship becomes more accurate the higher up the number sequence you go. But the proportional relationship remains more or less the same. And so 13 would give you its two partner options, 8 and 21.

“But what about writing?” The daughter presses on.

You have to search for ways for how to apply it into anything. Since the Fibonacci sequence is a guide for structures, then you must search for where structures apply in text. In the essay, the easiest structures to identify are number of lines, sentences and paragraphs which can be counted. But besides these you have to come to understand that words and sentences form ideas. And ideas have weight. Just as in music some notes bring the music to a point of climax, the points which get our attention, some sentences or some ideas in an essay become its high points. So where do you put these high points?

If you follow the Fibonacci numbers, one easy structural plan is to do this: Divide the whole essay into five parts. Put its highest points near its third division. His Papa explained further. He writes his essays on a computer that gives him pages on a screen. The target length of his essays are one page plus a few paragraphs after, two or three. He figures that the end of the third division would be near the end of the first page. And so he tries to put the most interesting part of the essay here. As much as possible right at the end of his first page.

In this particular essay, that would be exactly right about now. We are at the end of page 1 on the computer monitor. It is around here we must write down an idea that might hold the essay together. In other words, its “Aha!” moment.

“I understand. But what does this have to do with making ideas?” She presses.

There is no problem making ideas. We swim inside an ocean of them all the time, every second as we drive ourselves through life looking out windows, looking at life and talking. The problem is not making ideas but simply choosing which particular idea before us to take in and make into something less fleeting than real life. We do not “make” ideas. They come to us. But only if we are open. What we need to do is simply to give an idea, any idea, form. We need simply to make it into a photograph if we are photographers, or into an essay or poetry if we choose to write.

The more important problem is how to make form beautiful. Classicists like Fibonacci believed there was a structural way to make these forms not only comprehensible and palpable but also beautiful. Not only that, they believed these were all related to the secret measures of the universe, its structural principles.

“Do you think about these principles all the time when you write?” Her Papa replies: Definitely not! But since he knows them it goes to follow they must find their way into his writing. Writing is only a short walk from one place to another. You simply move one word-step forward at a time. You never think too much with every step but if your travel seems to you beautiful. There’s a good chance other people will enjoy it as well. Fibonacci helps.