From the view of an airplane window, I watched the world as it zoomed out into clusters and rectangles of light.

Like a garden of stars, the light sat perfectly in each row like a synapse of our brains, which might as well explain why the world below was so pitch black, as even the city lights couldn't fill in those gaps.

Much like an artist, being a writer comes with spontaneous ideas and middle-of-the-night revelations as to the next piece or series of work. As I have often experienced, creativity and the most exciting ideas usually spring up when you least expect them. I believe that it is what creators scrawl on slips of paper at the thought of a new idea, the most beautiful part of creating. Like first sketches and rough lines of words strewn across the back of a receipt, it is the collection of napkins, post-its, and notes written in margins that bring our creativity to life, the beginning of our work, the first spark. Like a neuron firing across the synapse of our brains, it lights a path of interconnecting, intersecting lines. While the fact of writers and their habit of scribbling on the nearest blank surface whenever they come across a new idea may seem ordinary, if not familiar, it may come as a surprise that the act was also routine to many writers and poets alike from the 17th century. Found in her bedroom after her death, Emily Dickinson, similar to all writers, had a collection of rough ideas and the beginnings of poems written on all surfaces of discarded envelopes.

Now known as her Envelope Poems, Dickinson recorded short lines of poetry in various stages of composition on these scraps of paper, documenting her poetry writing process and giving us a hint of what these papers could have been and become. After these pages were discovered, they had since been published as a short poetry collection, with words written at their respective angles to preserve the uniqueness of their being written on envelopes. Through crammed words and scratched-out text, the reader is given a look into Emily's mind through these drafts. Although they were never polished for publishing and are simply paper drafts, Dickinson's Envelope Poems has become my favourite collection of poetry, as they are refined in their own way. After all, it isn't the final work but the drafts, lines of words, hastily written notes and the process of storytelling that makes up a writer's soul.