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.
