Really?! Oh, you’ve gone bananas. I veni!

(I came, just then, in the parlance of our times—in case you’re not into the whole Latin thing.

So ROYGBIC, as well.)

P Willy

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things, they don’t seem the same
Acting funny, but I don’t know why
Suck-kiss me while I kiss the sky

Jimi, Purple Haze (Prof P-mix)

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first feature is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The second feature is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal.

Affect is a constant current throughout your life, even when you are completely still or asleep. For some, the flow is like the trickle of a tranquil brook. For others, it’s like a raging river.

Affect is a fundamental aspect of consciousness, like brightness and loudness. When your brain represents wavelengths of light reflected from objects, you experience brightness and darkness. When your brain represents air pressure changes, you experience loudness and softness. And when your brain represents changing internal signals from your body, you experience pleasantness and unpleasantness, and agitation and calmness.

Affect, brightness, and loudness all accompany you from birth until death.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made

A story can be thought of as a mixing board with thousands of fader switches on it—thousands of decision points. The writer has to do two things: create the fader switches in the first place and then set those switches.

Imagine that mixing board is designed not to record music but to flood a room with beautiful, high-intensity light. Every adjustment of any one of those thousands of fader switches will subtly change the quality and intensity of light in that room.

In a perfect story, every switch is set just right, and the light in there couldn’t get any brighter or more beautiful. Revision is the process of going through a story again and again, microtuning the adjustment of the existing fader switches and introducing new ones as needed.

Every time you move one of those switches even a fraction of an inch, the system gets slightly more highly organized, and has more of you in it, and the light in the room gets more beautiful. (Well, that’s actually true only for the good decisions. But since we’re going to be deciding over and over again, we assume that, eventually, most of our decisions will be good ones.)

I like what I like, and you like what you like, and art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill. How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?

The choosing, the choosing, that’s all we’ve got.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain