Lateralus Thinking

At just a little under nine and a half minutes long, the song "Lateralus" can be a bit of a doozy to listen to all the way through. Regardless, this is one of my favorite songs by the art/progressive metal band Tool and I find its message important not just for writing but for life itself. The song warns against the creative sterility of constant overthinking and over-analyzing, claiming that it "separates the body from the mind." This in effect makes people little more than zombies bounded to the same routines and thought patterns. The song in turn urges the listener to actively reach out to "embrace the random" to free ourselves from this overly rationalist dogma. Although I have many patterns and routines, I still find this song important because it pushes me to explore the new (and probably strange) during what free time I have.
While this ideology of change is not very strong in my personal life, I feel that pushing beyond the conventional "lines of reason" is vital for writing. Rather than rigidly formulate a story and copy it down, I find it much more satisfying to start with a basic idea and try to let it take on a life of its own. This doesn't always work; maybe the story's a bit of a dead-end or needs to work a specific way. But when it does work and the story has evolved into something very different from the original idea, then I feel that something incredible has just occurred. And it makes me want to "swing on the spiral" of infinite possibilities even more.