Writing Companion

Writing from the Unconscious: Trying to catch the wind

6 May, 2008 · No Comments

What’s the link between your writing and your unconscious?

Applied to writing, the term ‘unconscious’ often refers to the phenomenon of dredging up from your mental depths something–an idea, a plot twist, a description, a change in the character–that takes your story to a new level. This ’something’ brings with it a power and subtlety. I think of the unconscious as the wind of your ‘deep-level’ imagination. It can often blow something useful your way–but only if you can tap into it.

Occasionally, I examine the structure of stories by some of my favourite authors. But doing so is like trying to catch the wind. Looking out my window on this cold autumn day (remember, I’m in the Southern Hemisphere so we’re going into winter), I notice a strong wind blowing the dead leaves in my yard and jangling the branches of the big conifer. I can see the wind’s effects but I can’t see the wind itself. Similarly, when I work through the structure of some of the best literary stories, I may be able to identify each part as contributing in some way to the plot, sense or tone but doing so does not help me pin down the magic of the whole. This kind of magic at times defies logic but seems right and satisfying to me as I read.

Here are some different takes on writing and the unconscious.

Dorothea Brande: The unconscious stores your type-story

One of the first modern writers to explain the link between writing and the unconscious was Dorothea Brande, in her 1934 book, Becoming a Writer: The classic inspirational guide.

For Brande, writers depend on a ‘free-flowing rich unconscious’ to open deeply hidden ‘treasures of memory, emotions, incidents/scenes, characters and relationships.’

She suggests that it’s not enough to tap into the unconscious and let its images and ideas flow into a story. Once writers linked to the unconscious, they also need to activate their conscious mind because it has an important role. The writer can put the conscious mind to work assessing the unconscious has thrown up. Brande writes that the cosncious mind’s job is to ‘control, combine and discriminate’ between the materials from the unconscious. Particularly, it needs to select whatever seems ‘universal’ and reject whatever is ‘too personal or idiosyncratic’ to translate well into a story for others to read.

Brande also believes that every writer’s unconscious ’sees things in types’. The unconscious holds a ‘type-story’, a sense of what an individual writer believes is worthwhile to write about. The type-story means that a writer’s stories will be ‘fundamentally alike’ on a deeper level. They may seem different because the  writer’s conscious mind provides a variety of different surface details.

In linguistics, we talk about language having a surface structure and a deep structure. Brande seems to be talking about something similar. The surface structure of a story comprises all the variations of character, setting, etc. The deep structure is the outcome of a writer’s conscious interests, plus his or her deep-seated and perhaps unarticulated views of the world, society and human nature.

Because this deep structure suggests to every individual writer what to write about, Brande does not believe it helps for writers to read ‘how-to’ material about structuring a plot. She believes a plot structure has to be ‘congenial’ to a writer, and it will only be so if it connects with the type-story in each writer’s unconscious. Perhaps that is why you cannot take someone’s suggestions for a story and run with it. If it doesn’t fit your unconscious story-type, you may not see or may not be interested in exploring it or even sense its story potential. It also explains why you can read a famous writer’s instructions about how to write (that person’s sense of type-story), but it doesn’t make sense to you (i.e., it doesn’t connect to YOUR mental type-story).

Stephen King: Tap into your far-seeing place

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, talks about a similar connection to the unconscious. He describes his mind as having two parts, like the structure of a house. The ‘up top’ part contains the ’surface things’ of life, all the knowledge that enables him to survive everyday life.

But his mind also has a ‘basement place’, which he says he’s built for himself over the years. He also calls this his ‘far-seeing place’, a place where he can take himself to ‘receive telepathic messages’. He believes that every writer needs this kind of mental/emotional place.

In his famous novel, Misery, he uses yet another image to depict how the unconscious can work for a writer. In the story, Paul, a successful writer, is being held captive by one of his fans, Annie. Annie forces him to write a new novel. Despite being injured and very scared, Paul finds that his unconscious takes over to help him produce. The unconscious is described as the ‘guys in the sweatshop’. When Paul’s stumped with his plot, he sends the problem down to the guys, and they work on it while he’s sleeping, eventually sending a solution back up to his conscious mind.

What a great image about how our minds work. Sometimes I finish what I think is a final draft. But upon waking the next morning, my own ’sweatshop’ workers have come up with something to include or change. I have a similar experience with crossword puzzles. An impossible clue frustrates. An hour later, I pick up the puzzle, and the correct answer snakes out from somewhere.

Diane Setterfield: Compost ideas

Diane Setterfield describes in her novel, The Thirteenth Tale, how a writer’s unconscious takes and changes his or her experiences. The story concerns two women: Vida Winter, a famous and elderly novelist, and Margaret Lea, a young biographer. Margaret hesitates about writing Vida’s biography because Vida has given so many different accounts of her life over her long career. Vida explains that she has kept the facts of her life secret because her unconscious draws on her life experiences to develop her imaginative store:

Life is compost….All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable . . . . . Every so often, I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel. . . .The writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

I enjoy reading how writers explain their use and understanding of the unconscious. And as a reader, I feel that sometimes I  come close to the edges of the author’s unconscious. This happens when I am reading a work that is impossible to skim because the story’s meaning does not lie on the surface. The writer has done something powerful because the story moves and disturbs me in a way that is difficult to explain. And trying to dissect such a story to analyse how the writer has accomplished this feat simply does not work. The story’s sum is greater than its parts, and such dissection is impossible, like trying to catch the wind.

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So, what are you writing today?

20 April, 2008 · 2 Comments

What an inspiring story, from the Australian government’s publication, News for Seniors (Autumn, 2008, Issue 73). An article titled ‘So, What Are You Doing Today’ focuses on Mrs Phyllis Turner as an example of never being too old to follow your dream.

At 95, Phyllis was awarded a research-based Masters degree in medical science. (See this youtube news item.) This feat has resulted in her being nominated for the Guinness Book of Records and the South Australian government naming her its Adult Learner of the Year.

Her story is even more inspiring when you read that Phyllis left school at 12 to help look after her siblings when her father abandoned the family. Later, while raising her 7 children and 2 step-children, she kept learning on her own. At age 70, she applied to an undergraduate degree and topped the essay exam as part of the entry requirement. When she was 90, she finished her Honours degree in anthropology. She enrolled in the Masters degree after her husband died.

Explanation: In the Honours degree, you must complete an independently researched thesis. If you are successful, you can go on to undertake a research Masters or a PhD, which both require independent research. You normally do not attend any classes but have occasional meetings with your supervisor. This kind of research is challenging and confronting–it’s just you alone, wrestling with your topic, month after month. For the PhD, it’s usual for students to study part-time and complete it in 5 years. And Phyllis’s supervisors are now encouraging her to enrol in a PhD!

When I read about Phyllis, I was reminded of older ‘new’ writers who think they’ve left it too long, that they’re too old to start scribbling down their thoughts and stories. When someone tells me this, the stories of two inspirational older women come to mind.

  • The first is a well-known fiction writer, Helen Hooven Santmyer. She wrote throughout her life but success came late. Finally, in 1984, the big novel she had worked on for decades, And Ladies of the Club, hit the bestseller lists. It is still a favourite of mine. I heard her being interviewed shortly after its publication, and she said she was already at work on her next novel. At that time, she was 88.
  • The second inspirational woman was not a writer. She was in a class with me at uni. In her 70s, and with a strong German accent, she told me one day that she had recently won the high dive championship in a masters athletic event for older athletes. I asked when she had started diving, picturing her as a strong, young woman chosen in pre-war Germany to become one of the State-trained sporting elites. I even felt some envy, her having all those years to hone her diving skills. What a shock when she told me that she had not taken up the sport of high diving until she was in her 50s.

These two examples have impressed upon me to not waste energy on worrying about getting old, but use that energy to pursue loves and interests.

So, if you truly like writing, go for it. Yes, you may be too old to be a wunderkind–but some early achievers burn out early. And you have something that the younger writers don’t have–years of experiences, your personal writer’s treasure trove that you can draw upon whenever you write.

So, what are you writing today?

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Writing prompt 11: Twisted Titles

15 April, 2008 · 1 Comment

Good writing prompts are always available to you in books of short stories. Read the short story titles and look for one that provides a twist of interest. Can you find one that evokes something in your mind? That makes you want to write in response?

You don’t need to know the story behind the title. In fact, it’s better not to. Why burden yourself with two mental processes: thinking up your own response while also ignoring how a famous writer handled the idea? Imagine using as your prompt the title, A Christmas Carol, then spending energy keeping your mind away from Ebeneezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, etc.

Below are 15 story titles from Australian writers. I hope some appeal to you, perhaps helping you conjure up an image or an incident that you want to write about.

Explore even more possibilities by playing with or ‘twisting’ the titles, seeking spin-offs. Perhaps Serious Swimmers does nothing for you, but you find that your imagination is grabbed when you revise it to Serious Non-Swimmers, Serious Tennis Players, Seriously Swimming, or even Serial Swimmer. Think of contrasts, opposites, something that’s out of the ordinary, that pushes you beyond the first image or idea you come up with when you read the title. Examples: Dry Swimmers, Desert Swimmers, Polar Swimmers, Moon Swimmers.

Take a playful approach. Writing prompts don’t often have hard and fast rules. They aren’t inherently creative. Instead, they provide ways for you to start playing with ideas, words and images. To start unlocking that great creative storehouse that is your mind. If a prompt doesn’t interest you, modify it into something that does.

  • You can use each title as a prompt for starting to write. You may want to freewrite or complete a clustering or mapping exercise. In both instances, you are aiming to record the associations your mind makes as it plays with the title.
  • You may want to explore the titles by creating a first draft for a more formal piece of writing, such as a poem, short story, or personal account.

As always, if you want to share what you’ve written, save it on your blog, then leave a comment here with your link so readers can get to your work.

Sources: Dark Roots, Cate Kennedy, 2006 and Journeys: Modern Australian short stories. Ed. Barry Oakley, 2007.

  1. Cold Snap (Cate Kennedy)
  2. What Do I ‘Do’ With Cancer? (Steve J. Spears)
  3. Dark Roots (Cate Kennedy)
  4. Serious Swimmer (Michael Faber)
  5. Elsewhere (David Malouf)
  6. Driving the Inland Road (Julie Gittus)
  7. The Romance of Steam (Ian Callinan)
  8. The Last Visit (Paddy O’Reilly)
  9. The Testosterone Club (Cate Kennedy)
  10. The Worst Thing (Philip Canon)
  11. Stone (Liam Davison)
  12. Rite of Spring (Margo Lanagan)
  13. A Perfect Circle (Peter Symons)
  14. Travelling (Joan London)
  15. The Correct Name of Things (Cate Kennedy)

Some ideas:

  1. Dark Roots Hair? Genealogy? Childhood? Teeth?  A growth? Something in nature? Secrets?
  2. Driving the Inland Road A real road? A psychological one?
  3. The Romance of Steam Steam train? Steam room? Steam in a restaurant? Camping at a hot springs? A luxurious bath? The old steam radiators? Steamy tropics? A steamy night with someone?
  4. Stone A noun? A verb (stoning someone, being stoned)?
  5. The Correct Name of Things What things? Who says/thinks there’s a ‘correct’ name?

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