"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble...?"

[landingtree]

I keep tweaking this in the hopes that it will cohere into an essay, and one that is not based on experiences as un-generalisable as dreams, but I have a large proofreading job to do and also accidentally deleted part of a previous draft because of how Dreamwidth post-saving works, so to hell with it.


"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus?” wrote Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Woolf made her famous reply:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

Did she think differently next year? I don't know. Here's a related quote, this time from one of those Delany essays I was reading last year called Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student.

"The first side [of literary talent] is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism... Nothing else effects it... Generally speaking... the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another. To effect this one must encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and experience it. . . well, through the body. Clumsy, inadequate, and not quite accurate, that's the only way I can say it."

Though Delany is talking about learning writing always and only from other writing, while Woolf is talking about learning style from whatever you perceive, they agree that writing is a matter of setting working in yourself, or submitting to, a pattern you've already absorbed. In this view, is writing beyond the bounds of what can be learned consciously? That was my initial disheartening impression of Delany's essay, and what a creative writing teacher friend of mine thought of it too; even if that were true, it wouldn't be much use. But I no longer think that's the implication. In any class that's about learning to reproduce a method, I find that I'm searching for the experiences a teacher’s language corresponds to. I only really notice this when it's difficult. At aikido, when I was a child, we used to be told ‘find your centre;’ more than a year after we stopped going to aikido classes, I was doing the stretches in the back garden and went, “Oh, that’s what they meant.” And then for two days I walked different. Although it consists of using words, I don't know that the act of writing is necessarily more describable in words than physical movement is – and I don't think it's less describable, either. The bottom-up and the top-down are interlaced like fingers.



***

I remember rejecting the rules of composition that went up on the board in high school English class, just because they were rules. I would leap to the exception (I can write a scene with no characters in it). These days I'm ceasing to think of that as having been a good thing. I have a beginner's sense of pattern when it comes to chapter and book, which became very clear last year when I tried to write a book and observed the ways I was struggling. 'Scene with four characters' is still so difficult. Maybe this is because I've had this distrust of perfectly sensible rules - a distrust that keeps me from writing my way into those rules, from getting the rhythm of them. I'm good at smaller patterns. I can pastiche – briefly. I find myself falling into voices, and whether they're anyone's I don't know, but they're certainly their own. I’m good at foreshadowing, too, though sadly this doesn’t mean I know what it is I’ve foreshadowed. It just means I’m going to have to work it out.

The other day, for a group exercise, I wrote a 300-word sentence. Having started with the line 'There's a knock at the door but it's only the wind', I kept extending and repeating it. Then at the end I went, 'What's the name of this foot I used?' Google told me: anapest. Being prose, and hasty to boot, the exercise escapes from being all anapests, but keeps on coming back to them. It's easy for me to think about the wave in the mind when it's a simple, literal rhythm: sometimes I can fluently approximate metre and sometimes I can't.

Writing in metre is having my decisions bounce repeatedly off an extra constraint. This is why I can usually only do it when I haven’t decided what I’m writing about, or am willing to let that bigger decision change suddenly. The metre I fell into with this exercise had nothing exactly to do with the events the sentence was describing – but it determined them, because if it hadn’t been there, breaking and tumbling in my mind, I'd have been responding to different constraints.

I often start stories (I mean, the ones I've managed to finish) with a big plot-neutral framing idea. I have a story where a series of fanciful dishes are served at an elven restaurant, and a story where the contents of a dragon's horde begin to rot when the dragon is killed. The framing images aren't the most important things going on, but they're the first things, and the story is built inside them, as characters and events get spun off the inevitable consequences. I've tried a lot of versions of this that turn out to be too abstract, or not rooted enough, to work. I've tried to make patterns using larger narrative objects like chapter-structure and character arcs, and they don't work. I don't have those patterns (yet? For long enough at a time?) and I have to go bottom-up, which sometimes feels like I'm trying to reinvent the wheel while seated in a room full of wheels - or like Pierre Menard in the Borges story, trying to write the Quixote. Is this actually the way I need to do it?

I suppose it's mainly a matter of what I believe I understand. It's not that I write metrically well, so much that I sometimes write it confidently. When I’m starting from a character, or from research material, what I have is “How should the person act? How should this world work?” I can answer those questions, but it’s different from when I’m starting from ideas like the above, which give me “This is how it acts. This is how it does work.”


***

I am a very doubtful, indecisive person. This has been known since childhood, but I feel like I'm still coming to understand more about it. The few religious experiences I've had have been characterised by things being absolutely so, in a way that's immune to doubt. I don't believe in any supernatural beings, but that doesn't stop these states of mind (I've only had two or three of them) absolutely putting stuff in place which then stays in place for weeks and months. I have to imagine psychologies for which that kind of experience is just sort of... the default? (I wonder what their religious experiences are like).

This is the background of my thoughts on creative fluency, because I find the blank page is often very powerful and the things I've put on it are often very frail. Events are so up for grabs that they need an almost supernatural blessing, a sense that the characters are really there and what they have said isn't just words, it's events, it's a fait accompli. Could I change my mind about it? Well, maybe in a later edit, but for the moment, I'm afraid the demon did just go to bed, so, however useful it would be, he can't have a conversation with the protagonist: he has to leave her a letter, so her aunt can read it and say, 'Hey, have you considered that perhaps this man is a demon?' and then that's how the plot goes. The way I have tended to write is a product of finding certainty difficult.


***

All this makes it interesting for me to think of the cases where I find it easy to imagine and decide. One instrument for this is Surrealism. After rushthatspeaks told me about Surrealism on a cool discord radio-show, I tried applying bits of it. Part of what he said is that Surrealism is often seen as its outputs, which are weird art in which the cats are backwards and the clocks are salt-shakers, when to its practitioners it was very much an exploration into processes. The Surrealists loved games and rules. Rules were tools to get at the unconscious mind.

An example of a Surrealist thing to do: sometimes I've applied walking rules. I went for a walk and only turned right. I went for a walk and moved from the bluest thing I could see, to the next bluest thing I could see, and so on; or the greenest. Another time, I followed birds. Another time, I hummed whenever I was walking over dead leaves. Two things interest me about this. One is that there's always more contained in the rule than I think at first. There always comes a point when I realise something surprising about it. Do the turns have to be right-angles? If the main road is bending left and there's an available right turn, do I have to take it? What shade counts as bluest? If the bluest thing is the sky, what do I do? (Since I don't remember this particular problem coming up, I assume it was cloudy that day). If the bluest thing is on a distant hillside when all I wanted to do was walk around the block, am I going to cheat? (I always cheated eventually, since making an outward trip while making sure there was always a chain of bluest objects I could follow back to my house would have been difficult. Well, I say that, but come to think of it, I could have used two bright blue yoyos).

The relevant thing here is that all the decisions I made about this were easy. The stakes were low. Cheating was totally okay but didn't feel like sabotage. It was easy to experience my decisions as inevitable. I had a recurrent, pleasant sense of, “Well of course the rule is to be interpreted thusly.” It was as easy to extrapolate as a dragon's hoard rotting.

That same creative writing teacher friend of mine, when I described Surrealist rule-following to him, said first “This is roleplaying games,” which I think is true, and then, a bit later, “This is… Life? In general?” which I think would only be true if people didn’t get used to things, and assiduously pursued active, conscious inquisitiveness – though that describes my friend better than it does me, certainly me a year and a half ago when we had the conversation and I was about fifty percent more depressed.

***

Another territory of easy imagining is music. This brings me back to the concert I went to a while back. From the second movement of Tchaikovsky's 5th, I took this idea: a lake, small but not too small, round but not too round, with a stone/shingle beach and a cottage near it. Sometimes an auditorium forms beneath the surface of the lake, and fills with people – humanoid, but not human. You can see mainly the tops of their heads. They're looking up at the beach. Their faces aren't clear. You can't disturb the water, but the water lets itself be disturbed after a while, and then they're harder and harder to see, and then they aren't there anymore.
Of course this started with looking at the heads in the rows in front of me and imagining water over the tops of them. It's also the part that I've pruned as possibly useful, because I like magical bodies of water; after that it went on to some stuff that seemed to belong to the music but not to this particular image. In fact, I get a common kind of moment when the weighting of my attention shifts back to the music, and I realise the story in my head no longer matches, and there's a moment of resistance, before (this is one of the things I've got better at that lets this sort of visualisation feel like part of the music and not a distraction from or opponent of the music) I switch to something else. It went on to involve people above and below the water and a handclasp across the pool (I clasped my own hands, held tightly, held loosely) and then eventually something like Steven Universe's fusion between worlds, and then the man in the above-world went into the cottage and we zoomed out further and further on the lake and then the planet. (I remember how that image came about: the impression I received was 'and then the house gets smaller' but it seemed impossible or the wrong mood for the house to literally shrink, so instead I zoomed out).

Another thing that often happens – this might change if I knew the music better – is that a story will get into a loop where the same thing repeats. During the fourth movement: okay, so the goblins need a small space program to get to the small round portal hanging about five hundred meters off the ground. (This is the same entity as the lake, but also, it's because that particular concert hall contains a big hanging wooden donut for the sake of acoustics). They build a rocket! They reach our world, great! But the music's not done. I guess that was just the depiction of the event etched onto the side of the rocket the goblins are building now but haven't launched yet. So now it launches! And the goblins run around everywhere and start building a city! Oh, but the music's not done. Somehow they're still trying to get up through the portal but this time using sex magic? Because I thought about sex but now I'm once again thinking about goblins. I guess when goblins have sex they levitate. Images of energetic goblin sex. Goblin sex training college. Distraction into worldbuilding implications. Okay, they've got up through the portal again. But the music's still not done. Round another time. I feel like this was a feature of my imaginings in childhood, and has never really stopped being when I stop and think about it: that they coil again and again through the same events.

Another piece in the concert was Don Quixote. Much of this piece I spent not having narrative thoughts, but as it got near what sounded like an ending, the end of The Singing Detective (a show I have seen one episode and one clip from) and the end of Don Quixote (which I remember only in the most general outline) combined in my head with two images of doublings: first was the old man from The Singing Detective arguing with his psychologist that nihilism is correct, damn it, and then a bit later there was a matching double between Don Quixote, (now the old man, alone in the bed), and the landscape outside his window, which I had earlier established as an image of the land of his travels, and then there was a synthesis and resolution between them. In general these images and resolutions are simple. In detail, they were all complicated in a way that doesn't yield accurate memories. This kind of experience isn't inherently beyond description, but, being dense and quick and intertwined, it is beyond recall: if I'd stopped and taken notes right afterward, I'd already have begun to get things wrong. But if you'd been able to stop time and ask me why the thing I was imagining had changed - what had brought about the bed and the landscape and the psychologist, not just in the on-the-nose thematic forms I was feeling so keenly, but with shapes, colors, angles - then I could have told you what notes and tambres had done it.

One thing about this is that it made me better at being social for the next two days. (“This music is as complicated as people are,” I thought. Later I turned that around and thought: this way of listening is a good model for not being anxious). Another thing about it is that it sounds a lot like dreaming. I don't have any other creative process that's so inclined to switch mediums: when I dream, and when I listen to music, maybe the thing I'm imagining will suddenly turn out to have been a film, or the goblin rocket launch will become an etching. I think I know why this is. If I'm in the middle of a deathbed scene and the music suddenly gets undignified and what I imagine is a giant rubber duck, I can't afford to suppress the duck in order to retain the deathbed scene; in that case the story would diverge from the music. Not to worry: if it is important enough that I remember it, then it'll come back around presently; or in another way, the music isn't just going to forget about the themes and emotional movement that made me think of a deathbed, so it will come back around to them. The theory that's stuck in my mind about dreams is that they're mainly formed during the first instants of waking, an attempt by memory to get a hold of what's just been going on. Dumping a bagful of prompts into memory's lap and saying ‘Quick, put these in some kind of order!' Because I have freed myself from sense but am still, on some level, always automatically making sense, I get frame stories: 'oh, this part is very different from that part because it was a movie and now these are the people who were watching it’ is a common one. The rubber duck is re-integrated as a metaphorical duck, or a picture hanging on the wall. In dreams I have the impression that this is usually a one-way bridge; with music I think I’m more likely to complete the frame story, being closer to conscious decision-making.

***

Imagining things in a concert hall is my most vivid recent experience of creativity as an experience, where the choosing and the feeling parts of the mind are talking so excitedly to one another that it ceases to feel right to call them two different things. Writing, by contrast, has been very bits-and-pieces-y, without much getting into the swing of it. Even the last concert I went to wasn't like this. But it's nice to have in recent memory the fact that there are swings to get into.

Comments

[sartorias]

Still pondering this post...

[landingtree]

Me too!

I liked your post a couple weeks back about collaboration, by the way. There's such zappiness to creative collaboration! I think of writing with my granddad, getting chapters from him and thinking (about equally often and with similar charges of 'I know what I want to happen next') 'Ooh, yes, that's good,' or 'What on earth, I need to counteract that in some way.' That's one of the conclusiony things I thought about but didn't put in the post.

[sartorias]

That sounds so special and lovely.

Thank you!

[ambyr]

I'm glad you did post this, unfinished though it is. Love your description of how a story can loop during development. Deciding which version is the "final" one--that's hard.

[landingtree]

I never have worked out when to stop editing! Except that when something seems to have been getting steadily less like itself for a few rounds of tweaking, it's time to revert to whatever it was before that tweaking and wash my hands of it.