In his novel The End of the Affair – told from the first-person viewpoint
of fictitious novelist Maurice Bendrix – Graham
Greene discusses this in detail.
And he most importantly tells us the following: When not writing, we might be
busy with other things – going to the supermarket, recording our business
expenses, chatting with our chums – but “the stream” of the unconscious goes on
flowing regardless of all that, studying the problems in our story and
pre-planning.
That is perfectly true, and I believe that I can prove
it.
You spend most of the afternoon working on a new
novel. Finally, you reach the end of the chapter you’ve been busy with and
decide to call it a day. Your partner comes home and you talk about the day’s
events. You watch the Simpsons and
the TV news. You read the evening paper. Then there’s dinner, washing up. And then, when it’s round ten o’clock and
you’re preoccupied with something else, the book that you were working on a few
hours back suddenly pops into your head again. You abruptly realize that you’ve
got some detail wrong, or ought to add more detail, or the whole plot would
work better if you changed this thread to that. It might not even be the
chapter you were working on that afternoon. It could be a scene you wrote last
week, or one you haven’t even written yet but suddenly have definite ideas
about.
But the real point is this. You weren’t consciously thinking about your book at all – you had
completely different matters on your mind. The notion that just struck you
came, apparently, from nowhere. Except that cannot be true.
The only explanation has to be that your subconscious
mind continued working on your book the whole while you were doing all those
other things. So it already knows your story and where it is headed. Quietly
and secretively, it has more than likely figured the whole plotline out. Getting
all of that unconscious gunk out of the latter regions of your mind and up into
your conscious brain, where you can think about it, work on it and re-work it –
that is the true job of a writer. Greene was of the opinion that we “remember
the details” of a piece of fiction, rather than inventing them. So that on one
level, a part of the task before us is already done.
But those sudden flashes of revelation are not simply
your subconscious helping you. They’re your subconscious yelling at you – “Put this right, you dope!” And it’s important that you
take immediate notice; mental promptings of this sort have a nasty habit of
sinking back far too quickly into the tar pits from which they first emerged. I
might not type up notes before starting a novel (see Chapter 4) but I do
meticulously write these elbow-joggings down as soon as they have come to me,
on a pad or Post-It if there’s one handy, or on the torn-off corner of a
newspaper or envelope if not.
It’s often the case that – once produced – there’s no
need to refer to these small scraps of paper. The simple act of writing on them
is an aide memoire in itself. But I always make sure to
rifle through them once a new draft is complete, discarding those that have
already been used and keeping those that might just still be helpful.
But is that the only thing that your subconscious
does, simply jog your elbow? No, it tries to guide your entire journey through
the telling of a story, and it does that thing by leaving clues.
It is important – at this point – to understand how
the subconscious mind works in the first place. This might sound unhelpful from
a writer’s point of view, but it does not use words as a medium the way the
thinking part of the mind does. It does not
form sentences, nor does it decide that one adjective is better than another.
No, all it largely does is throw up dreamlike images and vague conceptions
which the conscious part of the mind absorbs. Your conscious mind translates
those images, solidifies them with real detail, and then turns them into prose.
In fact, it might be said that writing is a process where the two separate
parts of your mind start ‘interfacing.’
The trouble is that you are often so fixated with the
conscious act of completing your story, you might well miss the true significance
of what those images are trying to tell you. Let me illustrate this point with
an example from real life.
One of my oldest friends occasionally enjoys taking a
crack at writing fiction. He was halfway through a long sf story one time, but
had got stuck in terms of plot, and so he asked for my advice.
His story was a post-apocalyptic one, set within a
blasted landscape populated by barbaric characters, but with some technology
still intact. His Character A was down in the desert. His Character B was up in
the air above that desert in – if memory serves – a rather battered but still
functioning flying machine.
“I need to have these two characters meet,” my friend
said, “but I can’t figure out how to make that happen.”
I gave his last few paragraphs another glance.
Character A was looking up at Character B’s flier, which was already moving off
into the distance. But the flying machine … it was not only battered, it was
leaving in its wake a thin, dark trail of smoke.
And there’s
the point at which my friend’s subconscious had dropped him a clue, except he
didn’t have enough experience to see it.
“There’s something wrong with that flying machine. So
have it crash land, and your characters can meet that way.”
Which doesn’t merely solve that immediate problem – it
opens up whole realms of possibility in terms of plot and character
development. Here are just a few of the options from this point on:
1/ A rescues B from the crashed, burning flyer. They
become close friends and allies.
2/ A and B were enemies before the crash. But now B
feels indebted to A, which has consequences later on.
3/ A pulls B from the flier, but B is badly hurt. A
feels compelled to nurse him back to health.
And so on.
The fact that your subconscious mind already knows
your story means that what you have already written holds the keys to what you
will write next. The details you have set on paper … they might seem to have
been chosen arbitrarily, but that is not the case. Somewhere in the far, dark
reaches of your mind, the tale you’re working on is already complete. And
another word for complete is ‘whole,’ every aspect of your story having
relevance to every other part.
If you mention a river near the start of your story,
that river is sure to put in another appearance sometime later on. Literally or
figuratively? That’s up to you, a conscious decision, except that it was
prompted in the first place by your latter brain.
Halfway through your story, your character stubs his
toe? You might see that as an amusing detail at the time of writing it … but
what if he has to run for his life in the later pages of your book?
I spoke in the last chapter about ‘little silver
bells,’ the process of seeding your story with tiny hints of what is coming
next, so leading your reader’s train of thought in the appropriate direction.
That’s a conscious process, a deliberate act of will. But while you’re writing,
even when you’re resting, your subconscious mind keeps doing the same, making
sure you describe details that will have relevance later on. The real skill
lies in spotting and deciphering those tiny clues. And you develop that skill the way you do most others,
through experience and practice.
The worst example of the output of a writer who’s
ignored both processes – the conscious and subconscious one – is a story which
culminates in what US magazine editors used to call a ‘banana surprise’ ending.
That is, an ending which was never once hinted at in the entire course of the
preceding story. Your female character – let’s say – is married to a violent
bully. All throughout the story, she is nervous, timorous, and cowed. She never
seems to leave the house except to go out shopping or attend her yoga class.
And then, right at the very end, it turns out she’s been having an affair for
ages with her husband’s boss, and they’ve been working out the perfect scheme
to do away with Mr. Nasty.
You can almost hear the writer of that bellowing tah-dah! But no, a story’s not that
kind of conjuring trick. A surprise ending is
a trick, though, and you need to be extremely artful in the way you pull it
off. Have your female character come home three hours late and smelling of a
man’s cologne and you’ll have given away the game completely. Your reader will
roll his eyes and move on to another book.
But wait. But softly …
When Mr. Nasty happens home one day, his wife is
talking on the phone. She hangs up quickly. “Just my sister,” she says calmly.
And your reader will most probably think nothing of it.
But your female gets back slightly late from yoga class
on one occasion because her instructor “asked me to help tidy up the mats.”
And on another occasion, she gets in her car and
drives half an hour to a different part of town because “the local stores just
don’t have what I need.”
Taken on their own, these three small incidents will
seem like nothing but the fine detail good writers fill a story with. Only that
when your reader reaches the conclusion, he’ll go: “Aha, that’s who she was talking with, that’s why she was late from class, if there really was a class at
all, and that’s why she was gone so
long when simply shopping!” All the little silver bells you’ve put in place
start ringing in his head at once.
But your subconscious mind is doing that to you the
entire time. Be aware of that process and make use of the help it gives you.
Don’t give in to it entirely, though. Your
subconscious might be brilliantly creative and can tell you which direction you
should go, but it lacks the discipline required to turn its images into a
finished piece of fiction. No, your intellect must do the rest.
This
article first appeared in HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING: THE ART OF CREATINGPROFESSIONAL FICTION.
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