Good writings happen to those who wait. Children’s author Enid Blyton told Peter McKellar—who was doing research on the imagination—that she has “merely to open the sluice gates.” With her portable typewriter on her knee, she waits with a blank mind: “The story is enacted in my mind’s eye almost as if I had a private cinema screen there . . . I am in the happy position of being able to write a story and read it for the first time . . . Sometimes a character makes a joke . . . and I think, ‘Well, I couldn’t have thought of that myself in a hundred years!’ And then I think, ‘Well, who did think of it then?’”
The answer, of course, is: she did.
Sometimes you don’t even need to wait at your keyboard. Rather than putting nose to the grindstone, you merely need the fortitude to put nose to the pillow: Mayakovsky tried for two days to come up with an image “to describe the tenderness a lonely man feels for his only love.” He went to bed on the third night with a headache. During the night he “leapt out of bed half-awake” with the image of how much a crippled soldier “cherishes his one leg.” In the dim light of a match, he wrote on a cigarette packet: “his one leg.” When morning came, Mayakovsky puzzled for two hours over the phrase, wondering “how it had got there.”
The answer, again, is: he put it there.
Unconscious material can rise to the top even when you are not waiting or sleeping, like an evasive song lyric or the dog’s name in the Thin Man movies (I’ll spare you: It was Asta). Mental knots often loosen spontaneously when you step away from the task. I was grappling with the title of a story, and the best I could come up with was “God’s Work,” which was close but no cigar—it didn’t illuminate the entryway into the story. I closed the file on my computer, and, while checking the five-day weather forecast for a place I was to visit in six days, it came to me: “God’s Will.” Cigar.
Writers spend countless hours looking for the precise word, the transcendent image, the felicitous turn of narrative. And doesn’t it feel good when these things just come to us? The rub is that the chance of a spontaneous solution (while asleep or awake) can be in direct proportion to the amount of conscious work we have been doing. In getting your writing to soar, there is no such thing as a free launch.
The surrealists’ notion that art and literature stem directly from the unconscious is quite appealing: just remove the lid of conscious effort and let your “automatic” pilot take over. For me, Vicente Huidobro was closer to the mark when he wrote about reason’s role in organizing poetic delirium: “If reason and imagination do not work in unison, one or both will suffocate.”
Baudelaire writes about “genius” as being childhood recaptured with “the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” And Max Jacob states it eloquently: “Lyricism belongs to the unconscious, but an unconscious under supervision.”
With the unconscious doing so much of the work, the least we can do is supervise.
The admixture of hard work (laboring over one’s writing) and dream work (reveling in poetic delirium) may sound contradictory, as does much advice you hear about writing. It serves well to embrace these contradictions in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” (A note of caution: Fitzgerald wrote this in an essay titled “The Crack-Up.”)
adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book
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