Don't you understand? I got even this story from Ender's mind. It's his. And he got the seed of it from somebody else, something he read, and combined it with things he thought of until it made sense to him. It's all there in his head. While we are like you. We have a clear view of the world. I have no trouble finding my way through your mind. Everything orderly and sensible and clear. You'd be as much at ease in mine. What's in your head is reality, more or less, as best you understand it. But in Ender's mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can't all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they're needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgements, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and illumination. We knew everything there was to know before we met these humans, before we built our connection with Ender's mind. Now we discover there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we'll never find them all.

She had opened her mind to the words the way an eye used to darkness, veiled with its lashes, opens cautiously to the light, and, finding it even a little blinding, closes itself too late. The light had come, and come invincibly, even after the eye had renounced it. It was too late to unsee.

Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him.

Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. “Are we alone now?” she asks.

“Guess so. You want to talk about something?” he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe.

“Of course!” She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable — those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage — and she winks at him again. “Oh, Pierre.” She smiles. “So easily distracted!” She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant.

[…]

“Not now,” he says. “Let's go back.”

“Okay.” She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger universe.

A word can only serve to indicate that someone else may have a valuable idea—that is, some useful structure to be built inside the mind. Each new word only plants a seed: to make it grow, a listener's mind must find a way to build inside itself some structure that appears to work like the one in the mind from which it was “learned”.

The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?

In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. What color is the consumer when you put him on the marketplace? Does he dip to the state of the lowest common denominator—a middle average consumer? Or does he oscillate in mad swings of forever trying to catch up with his own moving reflection?

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

Brain fart: noun. Quick-and-dirty creative output. The byproduct of a mind stuffed with food for thought that can therefore produce information without effort.

Writing is an art - a window into the deep minds of people. It’s mysterious; it’s a secret, but it’s known; and everyone has their own thoughts waiting to be discovered. The pen is not the tool - it is the mind.

Feel the words swimming through your head; feel them tickling your tongue; swirling; waiting to be told. Then grab a pen, and open your mind. Let your mind take you into worlds you knew but couldn’t remember, let you senses guide your hand, your words, each letter. Close your eyes. Think. Write.

Writing is clear and complex, it’s easy and it’s hard, it’s hatred and it’s love. Writing is not an art. Writing is a feeling and a thought and the ability to share.