Your first impression

You feel something. Then you feel silly. Then you look up a meaning and pretend the feeling never happened. That is how readers stay fluent in other people’s sentences and illiterate in their own.

Write it. Messy. Incomplete. A single word is allowed. A body sensation is allowed. A colour is allowed. Then do the rest of the work. Then see what survived.

The guidebook is not the enemy. You have already been taught to honour it. It is simply not allowed to speak first. If it speaks first, you will hear it instead of the card in front of you.

The first impression is often simple. The cleverness arrives afterwards, when the mind starts building a case. That case can be useful. It can also be overthinking, which we will come back to.

A useful rule while you train: the first line gets written in the first thirty seconds. Not the best line. The first one. If you sit there composing, you have already left the impression and started a draft.

You can disagree with the first line later. You cannot recover it if you never wrote it down.

I said it is information. I did not say it is scripture. Sometimes the first hit is the true centre of the reading. Sometimes it is your mood. Sometimes it is a private association that belongs in the notes and not in the sentence you say out loud.

The rest of the Method is how you find out which. Looking. Position. Question. Surrounding cards. Traditional meaning last. If the first impression still stands after all of that, it has earned its place. If it has quietly left the room, let it go.