A Writer's Notebook, Day Thirty-Nine

Their are times when a story will seem to begin to open up.  It is often at a moment when things feel stuck, and suddenly it becomes obvious the next beat that needs to happen.  At least, it feels that way to me.  It could just be that I do better when I back myself into a corner, that the pressure forces my imagination into gear, but often the new ideas feel somehow like they have already been there in the story.  As if my unconscious had been foreshadowing the coming action even before I was aware of it.  So, I tend to suspect that it may be, rather, that my unconscious is trying to give me a chance before it barges in and shows me what was already supposed to go there.

Aldous Huxley wrote almost entirely in trance, or at least that is the story that I've heard.  He would sit down and go into an alternate state and wake up with the next section of his writing.  That was his process.  Indeed, he even worked extensively with the noted hypnotist Milton Erickson at one point on a book.  That book does not exist, as the manuscript was burnt in a house fire at Huxley's home.  The point, though, is that trust of the deeper self that Huxley managed.  I am not there, myself, though I am open to the possibility of experimenting with writing in trance, but what is more significant is that Huxley had such implicit trust in his unconscious.

I mean, I suppose it makes sense that we should trust those faculties, and I recognize, as said above, that they are often doing a lot of the work before I realize it, but I would like to be able to just go for it like that.  Huxley was able to get himself out of the way and trust those parts of his mind to do all the work.

The real bottom line is that I just would like to feel that I am able to enter into that creative process more easily and with more steady results.  That statement is, of course, about the fiction and poetry that I have been attempting to work on lately.  Yes, I am still going, but I feel a lot as if I am spinning my wheels with some of it.  I suppose that I should recognize, as I say that, the huge leap that I must have made to be thinking this while still being productive here on this blog.  Sure, I have had a slowdown this week, but that was a result of outside forces, and I never missed a day entirely.  Writing on this blog has become ingrained into the daily fabric, now; a true habit.  But, even as I acknowledge my gratitude for that, I recognize that I need to get my other writing up to that level as well.

Now, following the strange leaps that I feel are connecting much of this, I suppose the bottom line is that I am telling myself, in some way, the answers.  For one, the daily working is a huge part, but I need to make a stronger commitment to that.  I have to give myself a word count starting tomorrow, I suppose.  I will make it small to begin with, but I will have to keep increasing it.  The point has to be to get the writing done at a steady pace, and to do so with a bit of pressure.  In some ways, I think that the goal of such a practice is actually to get out of my head and just write.  It is like the way that some authors will free-write, just setting a pen to a page and not stopping until they are done.

I think that gets to the real point, though, which is that I am not trusting some aspect of myself enough to guide me, or maybe I am just not giving it enough of a chance.  As I said, today I had a moment that gave me a bit of a breakthrough in writing the Bimble story, but I have to be able to have those moments more readily, or, better yet, to have a flow that does not require those individual moments.  That is, to be writing from that deeper well, whether with full awareness or otherwise, and to be able to go their with certainty on demand.

I have been reading a lot of Harlan Ellison since his passing earlier this year.  He has long been a writer I admire, but I had no idea of just how prolix he was.  First, he wrote more than athousand stories, as well as a double digit total of novels.  Second, he was fast.  He apparently wrote I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream in one sitting, and did not need to revise it.  This, to me, gives me a lot of hope.  Ellison saw himself as a working man.  He compared having written so many pieces to the number of toilets a plumber fixed in his career.  That is certainly true, and embracing the toil has never been my strong suit, but I am getting there.

The thing is that I know it can be done, and I am sure I can do it.  I've had times in my past when I was able to produce poetry at immense rates, and I am certainly not having difficulty with production on this blog.  It is merely a matter of entering the right mental space, and of learning the conditions that are needed to do so.  I'm not certain of how to do it, at this point, but the awareness that it is a matter of trusting in my unconscious is important.  The real trick is to get out of the way, and that feels difficult to me, as I know that when I sit down to write, a lot of the time I will think too much about where to start.  This is probably the real reason I like having that first line.  It is likely that will help me enter the mental state more easily.  It may be that I just need to find a way to get myself started in the right frame, and then it will just go.

The thing that gives me the most optimism, though, is this post itself.  I didn't start out wanting to write about any of this.  I just knew I needed to write this post, and this is what came from it, which suggests to me that my unconscious is ready and wants to go.  It is telling me what I need to know, and I just need to trust it to lead the way.  So, maybe the next time I sit down to work on one of my stories, their will be a difference.  Maybe not, but even if that is the case, I am certain that I am going in that direction.