Writing Companion

What link can I make between my experiences today and writing?

I had a phone call today from the guy who was to instal my new kitchen. Last week, he told me it was all systems go. How exciting — after weeks of planning a new kitchen, I’d finally see it. But today he told me the company had been sold.

It would have been worse if the company had closed halfway through installing my new kitchen. But now I have to go back to some of the kitchen installers I didn’t select and ask them to re-quote. And after working out exactly how I want my new kitchen, I’d like my plan to be followed. But installers–or kitchen designers as they now call themselves–have their own ideas of what’s doable and attractive. It could be a rocky road ahead.

Is there a lesson about writing in this experience? It certainly says something about handling disappointments, plus being prepared to make changes and keep going.

All writers have stories about publishing deals that don’t come off, broken promises, and big plans that go nowhere. Once a journal editor invited me to develop a series of articles on communication issues in the workplace. She was enthusiastic about the project and liked the synopsis I presented. But a few months later, she was impossible to contact. Instead of having the guts to tell me that a higher-up had vetoed the project, she let me dangle, wasting my time trying to work out what was going on. Another time, a co-author and I sent a research paper to an international journal. The editor, a senior academic, kept the paper for over six months and hid behind his secretary when we tried to find out if it was going to be published or not. We eventually withdrew it and published it elsewhere.

A positive from my kitchen disaster is that I still have a plan I like. In the same way, if your publishing plans vanish over the horizon, you still have your manuscript. You don’t have to start from scratch.

And a bad experience can help in the long run by making you more hard-nosed about writing transactions. Such as? Maybe it’s learning to ask more questions and to do this earlier. Or becoming more assertive about the fate of your manuscript. Or reading the fine print in a contract.

The good that can come out of bad experience in the writing market reminds me of the main character in Bonfire of the Vanities. He starts out thinking he’s invincible, a Master of the Universe. But then he has a string of bad experiences. However, by the book’s end he has evolved into a street-smart pragmatist, a survivor. And we all need to become street-smart when handling disappointments as we struggle to get our writing out there.

Here’s the writing lesson I drew from today’s experiences.

I went to my usual Wednesday Iyengar Yoga class, 7.00-8.30am. I’ve been going for a couple of years, so it’s a comfortable class. I know the routine, I like the regulars who attend, and I respect my teacher, Judy, who is a great model of dedicated yoga.

Today, Judy announced that we were going to go through a long and demanding set of poses described in Mr Iyengar’s book, Light on Yoga. We often stop in class to analyse a pose. No time for that today. For the next 90 minutes, we worked fast, zipping from one pose to another.

After getting over the shock of being in a ramped-up yoga session, I started to enjoy it. As we flowed from one standing pose to the next, my body surrendered to this quicker rhythm. No, it didn’t help me do all the poses better, but my body was well and truly awake and enjoying the challenge.

The lesson for writing? Later, I thought about how lazy I’ve become in that class, how much I’ve slid into a comfortable routine, taking the easy way out when the poses are difficult. I’ve built a comfortable box around myself, of what I think I can do and what I can’t.

As writers, we sometimes construct a similar box around ourselves– a box that confines our perceptions about what we think we can and cannot write, what we think we’re good at and where we think we fail.

Maybe the lesson here is to find ways to look over the sides of our box once in awhile. Or even to jump out of the box occasionally and take a salutary walk to our ‘wild’ side. To explore ways to push ourselves in our writing, especially into areas we normally declare off limits–e.g., unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas, techniques, emotions, styles, characters, writing genres, writing habits, and audiences.

A couple of hours after the yoga class, my muscles started protesting. Despite the twinges, I felt good for having stretched myself, literally, beyond my usual limits.

Now, can I find ways to stretch as much when I write?

How can you tap into your unconscious when writing? And why would you do this?

In writing, ‘unconscious’ refers to the act of dredging something up from your mental depths –an idea, a plot twist, description, change in the character–that takes your story to a more powerful and subtle level. The unconscious is the wind of your ‘deep-level’ imagination. It can often blow something useful your way– if you can tap into it.

Occasionally, I examine the story structure of favourite authors. But doing so is sometimes like trying to catch the wind. Looking out my window on this cold autumn day (in the Southern Hemisphere we’re going into winter), I notice a strong wind blowing the dead leaves around the yard and jangling the branches of the big conifer. I can see the wind’s effects but not the wind itself. Similarly, when I work through the structure some great stories, I can identify parts as contributing to the plot, sense or tone of the story. But this does not help me pin down the magic of the whole. A magic that defies logic but seems right and satisfying.

Here are some different takes on writing and the unconscious, from Dorothea Brande, Stephen King and Diane Setterfield.

Dorothea Brande: Find your personal 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.

She thinks writers can mine their ‘rich unconscious’ to open deeply hidden ‘treasures of memory, emotions, incidents/scenes, characters and relationships.’ But it’s not simply a matter of tapping into the unconscious and letting its images and ideas flow into a story.

Once writers link to their unconscious, they must activate their conscious mind, putting it to work assessing whatever the unconscious throws up to it. The conscious mind’s job is to edit–’control, combine and discriminate’ –the materials from the unconscious. Particularly, it must think about potential readers, selecting the material that seem ‘universal’ and rejecting what may be so ‘personal or idiosyncratic’ that readers would not make the same connections.

Brande also believes that a writer’s unconscious ’sees things in types’. The unconscious holds each writer’s ‘type-story’, that writer’s sense of what seems worth writing about. In linguistics, we talk about language having a surface structure and a deep structure. Brande seems to be talking about something similar for stories.

A writer’s type-story keeps all of his or her individual stories ‘fundamentally alike’ on a deeper level. Th individual stories differ only in the details, the surface features. A story’s surface structure comprises all the variations of character, setting, etc. Its deep structure is the outcome of a writer’s conscious, plus from the unconscious, his or her deep-seated and perhaps unarticulated views of the world, society and human nature.

Because this deep structure establishes what is worth writing about, Brande is against ‘how-to’ books about plots. She thinks that to work, a plot must be ‘congenial’ to a writer, that is, it must connect with the type-story in the writer’s unconscious.

Perhaps that is why you cannot always take someone’s suggestions for a story. If the suggestion doesn’t fit your unconscious story-type, it may not ’speak’ to you as something worth writing about. The idea of type-story also explains why come books on writing don’t appeal. It may be a case of the author’s sense of type-story being quite dissimilar to your own.

Stephen King: Tap into your far-seeing place

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, talks about connecting to the unconscious. He describes a writer’s mind as having two parts, like the structure of a house. The ‘up top’ part, the conscious, contains the ’surface things’ of life, i.e., the knowledge of everyday life, which we draw on to survive.

The other part is the unconscious. He calls this the ‘basement place’ or ‘far-seeing place’, that he’s built for himself over the years. It is the place where he takes himself to ‘receive telepathic messages’. The interesting point here is that this connection to the unconscious is something you need to build, like any skill. How? Some writers suggest writing every day. Others suggest freewriting, to let ideas and associations merge in illogical but creative ways.

In his famous novel, Misery, King shows us how this ‘far-seeing place’ works. Paul, a successful writer, is being held captive by one of his fans, Annie. Annie forces him to write a new novel. Despite being scared and injured, Paul finds that his unconscious helps him produce the required work. King describes Paul’s unconscious the ‘guys in the sweatshop’. When Paul can’t think of what to write next, he sends the problem down to the guys. They work on it and eventually send ideas 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. 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, but later the correct answer snakes out from somewhere.

Diane Setterfield: Compost your ideas for creative results

In her novel, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield describes how a writer’s unconscious can store and change experiences. Her novel concerns two women: Vida Winter, a famous and elderly novelist, and Margaret Lea, a young biographer. Margaret hesitates to write Vida’s biography because Vida has given so many different accounts of her life over her long career. Margaret wants the facts, the truth.

Vida explains that she’s kept much of her life secret in order to feed her unconscious:

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. As a reader, I sometimes feel that I come close to the edge of the author’s unconscious. Such works are powerful, in a moving and sometimes disturbing way. They are impossible to skim because their meaning does not lie on the surface. And it does not always work to dissect such a story, to search for the heart of its mystery. You may as well try to catch the wind.