I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten. Charles Frazier
About This Quote

In his poem, "I Cannot Decide," William Burroughs talks about the importance of writing things down. He says that the only way to become a better writer is to write lots of things down. If writers use their writing to make themselves feel better, it’s a waste of time. In order to write well, writers should keep their minds open and not use their writing as a form of self-improvement.

In this case, Burroughs uses the image of a rattlesnake skin stretched on a barn wall as a visual metaphor for writing down your thoughts and using them as a way to capture time in a safe, stationary place. He goes on to say that any form of writing is harmful because it’s impossible for words to ever capture reality exactly.

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