The premise is the frame, not the landscape

The verbal premise is a starting point, not the destination. It works like the frame of a window. The error is to keep looking at the wood.

On the other side is the landscape: the truth of the feeling, not the sentence that announced it. The driving idea has direction — what it wants to say — and impulse — the climate that pushes it.

If the frame gets in the way, it is broken. The text does not owe loyalty to its first sentence. It owes loyalty to what that sentence made visible.

Before technique, two questions: where am I, and what do I feel. Without that compass, rhyme leads anywhere.

Source: the notebook, "The method for developing your driving idea."