Ever say or write something and other folks say, "Huh?" Then you think about it, and you say, "I have no idea what I was thinking." Or you offer an explanation to someone, and it just makes things worse.
I used to do this a lot over the years. I was frequently accused or described somewhat paternally as talking in
non sequiturs. Until I encountered it in others, I didn't realize how frustrating that experience was for others. I think one reason I became a writer was I couldn't make myself understood in speech.
As I've gotten older and with practice, I've tried as much as possible to minimize this kind of stuff. But that's no mind. What I wanted to discuss was the idea in writing of control versus spontaneity. We can release creativity by simply allowing ourselves to write, to think, to imagine, without limit. This may be a left brain, right brain thing, or not, I don't know the brain chemistry. I do know how it works. You just let the inhibitions come down, and you free your mind to just run.
One thing amateur writers do is assume there is an inner wisdom or some remarkable depth in that running. There may be, but chances are there is not. What is frustrating for non-geniuses is that a genius can sometimes be a person who just lets down his guard, and can fly, and it's beautiful. For the rest of us, we have more work to do. And then at the end of the day, or even years of work, we may only end up with fine craftsmanship, not art.
The "Huh?" factor comes in this way: When you write freely, you'll often end up with a big, "Huh?" both for your readers and yourself. I would encourage you to not be discouraged, but realistic at this moment. Essentially, you've coughed up the psychic equivalent of a hairball. Now it's up to you to fix it.
And guess what? Chances are, you won't be able to. Why? Because it's a HAIRBALL. It's not inner wisdom, it's inner phlegm. When you show other people your phlegm, unless they are a doctor, they have a tendency to go, "Huh?" Then you look at the phlegm and go, "Yeah, huh?"
You are now ready to begin your next stage as a writer. In this stage, you learn control. You learn technique. How do you learn technique? You need to study with someone, read a lot, and talk about stuff with intelligent other folks. The actual techniques of writing are not a secret — NO MATTER HOW MYSTERIOUS OTHER WRITERS MAKE THEM SOUND. It's bullshit. Writers lie. Oh yeah, they do. They are simply trying to protect their turf.
Where is this information? Not in literary criticism. That's for readers. They're a different breed altogether. At some point, you will need to come to your writing as a reader does — with that degree of objectivity, and with that kind of critical eye. But that's putting the cart before the horse. This stage is about control, and control is learned by studying rhetoric, composition and logic. Chances are, your local university class was pure bullshit. Pick up a classic text — Aristotle's
Poetics and
Rhetoric, for starters. Then get Richard A. Lanham's
A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Then get John Gardner's
The Art of Fiction. After you do that, hunt down a mentor somewhere who already knows this stuff. Then work with him or her.
Getting control may take years. You'll know when you have control when you know how to fix a myriad of problems in your writing — you can identify what is interfering with the reading experience, why, and how to fix it. Soon, that control seeps down deep into your brain. You make corrections immediately, during writing, and then you can look at revision. Eventually, you may come to your writing as a reader does. You know how easy it is to spot other folks' mistakes, gaps, awkward moments, and the like? You'll get there ...
Then spontaneity becomes a different thing. You actually can be spontaneous, but you begin to know where the thought came from. You don't cough up a hairball. You exude thoughts on the page, and then look at them, and say, "Oh, I know what I was getting at. I was thinking about x and now this is a reaction to that. Or this is more of my concern about y."
Particularly, your mind may create, spontaneously, a counter-work to the one you are trying to "control". In fact, lack of creative writing can create kind of a Dutch Oven effect in your brain, stewing and simmering a different thing than you are working on, and you may not even realize it. Then one day, the whole thing comes down in one piece, like a big ole pot roast.
Almost anyone in a creative profession will tell you that. I was working and working on this design, and then suddenly the answer came out here. Christopher Isherwood talks about this experience (probably in
Christopher and His Kind) and suspects that your mind has simply worked out the problem on its own, without your conscious help, and tells you when it's done. He also believes that your mind may rebel from the thing you are trying to do and rather than argue with your conscious mind, your subconscious mind* doesn't let you know until it's got the whole thing finished.
That's how artists sometimes complete their best stuff quickly — the technique and control has already seeped into and disciplined the subconscious, which in turns can turn that control and discipline back on itself and come up with something new (to you). Of course, whether you've just reinvented the wheel is a different story. But this kind of process is the best shot many of us have in creating something worthwhile. And to bring this full circle, you'll know where it came from, and most likely, so will others. There will be less "huh?" factor — unless you chose that "huh?" factor to be there.
And yes, geniuses don't have to go through all this. But those folks are rare. I'm talking craftsmanship here, not art.
* A friend of mine is a Ph.D. in brain science and insists there is no such thing as the subconscious. When I suggested to her that the brain and mind were different things, she suggested that she didn't necessarily agree there was such a thing as a mind, either. At that point I changed the subject. One day, I need to reopen the conversation again.
