The Subconscious and the Writing Process

By Nancy Werlin

I’ve always disliked being told how I ought to go about writing anything. In ninth grade, I wrote a research paper weeks in advance, so that I could then use the paper itself as the source for the orderly outline and note cards my teacher wanted. In eleventh grade, I seethed with fury at the English teacher who told us to begin an essay with: “In this paper I shall prove . . .”

Only after becoming a professional writer did I understand how much of my resistance was about being instructed to use a form of process that was alien to me. I refer, of course, to the popular model: “Think. Plan/Outline. Research/Take notes. Write according to The Plan. Revise.”

Think the whole thing out in advance? No. I’ll do only just enough to get started, because I know from experience that I do my best thinking while writing. Outline? Never! I generate logical progression organically, from shifting and shaping the actual material as I work and get ideas. Research is absolutely vital, but I am (perhaps sadly) not in love with information for information’s sake; I like to get exactly what I need when I need it — and get only what I need. Revise at the end? Yes, I certainly do that; but, again, I proceed organically: plunging in armed only with the grim certainty that Things Are Wrong and, come hell or high water, I am going to fix them. I rarely know how until I’m doing it.

I use this subconsious-intensive process when I write anything and everything, from fiction to speeches to essays to the technical writing I do at my “day job.” The plan-in-advance method paralyzes me, while my method not only results in finished work of which I’m proud, but is also fast and efficient — because, I suppose, it’s my own method, perfectly adjusted and attuned to me, and because I have learned over the years to trust it implicitly, knowing it will take me places that planning never could.

Given this background, I read with great interest Jennifer Armstrong’s article “Blood from a Stone” (Horn Book, Sept/Oct 2000) in which she described herself using for her writing the very method that fails me so badly. It didn’t surprise me that Ms. Armstrong finds her preparation-intensive process suits her beautifully, allows her a doorway into an intuitive place later on, and results in strong work. I was both intrigued and moved by her description of her process.

But I was very surprised indeed by her strongly stated opinion that writers like me who say their processes are more mysterious must be either fantasizing or inarticulate. She writes:

This fantasy [that the creation of art is magic] is also supported by writers who, for lack of a better way to describe the creative process, say things like, ’Gosh, my characters just start talking and I never know what they’re going to say.’ I honestly don’t believe in this fantasy. It doesn’t happen that way with me, and I really don’t think it happens with other writers. I don’t see myself as a conduit for stories that are floating around in the vaporous dreamworld; I’m not channeling the thoughts of make-believe people. My imagination is a powerful organ and has done some far-out things, but I’m not psychotic. When I write a thing, I write it with deliberation. There’s a lot of machinery at work when a writer is composing paragraphs, and it is — or should be, in my opinion — the workings of a conscious mind.

I found myself wondering how she would react if I were to say firmly, “You’re merely deluding yourself into believing that careful planning and outlining are important; in truth, their effect is quite minor. I know this because early planning has little impact for me compared to what happens during the process of writing itself.”

Of course, that would be an absurd position for me to take — but so is Ms. Armstrong’s position nonsensical. Ask any neurologist: there’s no telling how any one particular person will choose to work on a problem; our brains (a word perhaps too narrow here) are capable — and indeed must — work in a myriad of diverse ways.

Thus I will say boldly that my characters do have conversations in my head and, like Faulkner, sometimes when I write I “just listen to the voices.” And yet I am, I think, no more psychotic than Ms. Armstrong. I also think it worth remarking that, as some astounding artists and writers have suffered from mental illness, I am dubious at the implication that art never traffics fruitfully in the parts of our minds that are harder to map.

In short, I ask — and am incredulous that I need ask at all — what about the role in creativity of the subconscious mind?

When I write a thing, I write it with a ferocious trust in the unknown stuff that lurks somewhere in my mind. Conscious deliberation is only one of several important strands of my mental weave, and I tend to use it best late in the process, during revision. It is my intuition, my subconscious, that is most important in pulling a work from nowhere and nothing.

Let me give some examples to show how this works.

First, I always start a novel in exactly the way that Ms. Armstrong does not: I simply begin writing and see what happens. For the novel I am currently finishing, Black Mirror, as I started Chapter One, I knew only that this was going to be a thriller/mystery, and that my teenage, female protagonist had a Japanese Buddhist mother and an American Jewish father. Then, when I set my fingers to the keyboard, a story my mother tells about her first menstruation at the age of nine floated into my head. Because I have learned to trust such moments, I knew to assume (for now at least) that the memory had not come to me randomly, but was part of whatever I would explore during this particular writing voyage. So I had my heroine, Frances, begin to speak of her own first period. And, as it turned out, while the novel is indeed a thriller with a Byzantine plot (figured out in the course of writing), Frances’s too-early menstruation turned out to be a central aspect of who she was, and therefore, in shaping the course of the novel.

Another example. When I was working on my second novel, The Killer’s Cousin, trying (late in the process) to figure out who David had killed and how, suddenly I dropped this important topic and became obsessed with working into the novel several references to the television series The X-Files. I knew quite well that it’s generally a bad idea to put references to popular culture into a novel; they tend to date the book. And I did not do this because I was a rabid fan of the series; I watched it idly and sporadically.

Yet I spent hours carefully preparing and inserting the exactly-right references into the exactly-right locations (unsure why they were exactly right, but knowing that they were). Only when I’d finished did I come to conscious awareness that I was going to use David’s discussion of the X-Files as a way for him to allude to his own feelings. And once I had that — a valid way for David to express directly how he felt without needing to talk about it directly — then I had a means to get close enough to learn who he had killed, and how.

One last example, from my third novel, Locked Inside. There was a sequence of chapters in which, after a bungled escape attempt, my kidnapped heroine, Marnie, had just been joined in her basement prison by her Internet pal. She was beset by a brutal tangle of complex and contradictory emotions, impulses, and thoughts, all of which needed to be accurately depicted even while the plot tore relentlessly on. I was incapable of coming up with a neat list of Marnie’s emotions and actions, let alone those of her fellow prisoner, let alone what would happen with all these elements (and some others I won’t mention here) combined. The only way to do this work was to stay on a mobius strip of writing and rewriting until the sequence “felt” right.

I do not claim that my subconscious does not lead me into some dead ends. These, too, are part of the process; not all ideas are good ones; and too many ideas can create even less satisfaction than too few. Will I sound psychotic if I confess that I often question myself aloud to see if something is working? “Nancy, do you really want the Star Market cards in there? What self indulgence!” And then I’ll say the possible replies aloud: “Yes, I want the cards; later on I’ll figure out why.” “No, the cards are silly.” Listening, I’ll know by the relative strength of my voice what it is that I feel.

I also do not claim that writing fiction is for me devoid of conscious intent. Certainly, with full deliberation, I must plant my butt in my chair and work long hours — months and years — to create a novel. And, as I work now on the final polishing draft of Black Mirror, I move through the story, consider its characters, and assess the whole it has become using the whole of my brain (or, at least, as much as is available). It makes for a lovely change, to know each day what is likely to happen when I sit down at my desk.

But the work of my fully-conscious mind is ending work. It’s the pressing of seams, the hemming, the adjustment of a dart in the garment that is the book. The subconscious-intensive environment is the one in which the real work — the selection of the fabric, the pattern-laying, the cutting and sewing — gets done.

In short, for me, writing a novel is a kind of magic. The only thing about it that is not mysterious in some way is the part where I show up, sit down, and stay seated.

In closing, I cannot resist sharing Philip Pullman’s description of how the writing process works for him. He doesn’t mention magic directly, but he talks about another vital element, one that is also inextricably linked to the process of creation:

Joy.

Well, then you take your big piece of paper with the plot on its yellow Post-It Notes, and your careful notes about the characters, and your photocopied information about castles and Finland, and you bundle it all up into a heap and you throw it all away.
 
Forget it.
 
It’s useless.
And you start writing something completely different, something that you have no knowledge of, something that just came into your head, something that is utterly strange to you.
 
And you’re seized by a fever of excitement. It’s like falling in love; it’s like setting out on a thrilling voyage; it’s like no other joy in the world. You are possessed. You feel radiant. You give off light.“ (Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book, retreived from www.randomhouse.com in 2000.)