Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.

West’s remark reframes writing as an inward act before it is an outward one. Rather than treating prose as a transparent conduit from author to reader, she suggests that the primary “conversation” occurs inside the writer: between impulse and judgment, memory and invention, conscious intention and half-conscious association. In this view, the page becomes a meeting place where conflicting or scattered mental elements are forced into relation and order. Communication to others may follow, but it is secondary to the writer’s effort to reconcile, clarify, or dramatize what the mind contains. The statement also implies why writing can feel revelatory: it exposes thoughts the writer did not fully know they had until language made them explicit.