Let your unconscious do the work
A previous post described using reflection to plumb your own depths for inspiration. But what about just going to sleep and letting your unconscious do the work?
I learned this trick from an author whose book I edited when I worked for a publisher. Carol (I’ll call her) was preceded by her reputation: she drove everyone crazy. But when I met her I realized she was just extremely right-brained and hyper-feminine—by which I mean she operated as far from logic and linear thinking as a person could and still be a full professor at a prestigious, male-dominated university. She had gotten her Ph.D. at a time when few women got Ph.D.’s, at another, similar university that was then quite hostile to women scholars, especially those who didn’t “think like men.” As I reconstruct it, she survived by surrounding herself with a kind of fog that made everything slightly unclear, effectively muddling the male professors who otherwise would have prevented her from doing her research the way she wanted.
She’d certainly created a muddle at my office. Her book was to have many illustrations, but nobody knew exactly how many. Everyone told me a different number. Under cover of this confusion Carol was set to slip far too many photos into her book, except that I checked her contract. When she showed up with an armload of prints, I said, “Your contract only calls for 100, so you have to cut 20 of these.” To my surprise, she went off happily and did it. I realized later that when she met me she knew intuitively that I couldn’t be muddled but I was also sympathetic to her vision for her book—and she was actually relieved that someone was cutting through the confusion.
So we got to be friendly, and she told me a couple of stories about how she worked that wound up profoundly influencing my own writing.
- Back before computers (not to mention the internet), note-taking for research-based books was done with index cards. On each card you recorded one fact (or maybe a couple of related facts). You organized your book by arranging your cards. Most people filed them in shoeboxes. One box might hold the facts for a chapter, sorted in order. You pulled each card in turn out of the box and wrote its fact into your chapter.
Carol, however, made notes on little slips of paper which she threw into a bag. Whenever she needed to find something, she had to paw through the entire contents. (Knowing her, I visualize it as an embroidered silk or velvet bag.) “It took me six months longer than anyone else to write my dissertation,” she told me, “but going through all my research over and over like that enabled me to thoroughly absorb it and deeply integrate it into my thinking.”
This tale inspired me when I did my own research for my two books, Slaying the Mermaid and The Women Outside. I couldn’t stand the notion of index cards, so I took notes on yellow lined pads. (No laptops then to take to the library.) My facts weren’t as thoroughly mixed up as Carol’s scraps of paper, but I still had to read through everything when I was hunting some detail. Computer searches are a lot more efficient, but Carol was right—your material doesn’t sink in in quite the same way.
- Even more critical for me was Carol’s second tip. “When I have a writing problem,” she confided, “I just put it into my mind before I go to sleep at night. Then in the morning, I know the answer.”
I’ve never done this precisely, but I’ve learned that the unconscious does a lot of work in the background while you’re otherwise occupied. If I’m not sure exactly how to frame an article, or how to express a certain idea, I have a choice: I can sit at my desk for hours and beat my brains out trying to come up with a solution. Or I can write the piece out as best I can, then put it aside and forget it for a couple of days. When I next pull it up onscreen, I pause at the first problematic passage and the right phrasing or idea just pops into my consciousness.
This is why I never, never let assignments go til the last minute. I always want those two days of off time to let my unconscious do the heavy lifting.
Not only does this tactic make assigned articles much easier, it’s just crucial for personal work. Not that I don’t sweat my brains out over that. But I do it so much more efficiently!
More on reflection
I’m still reverberating slightly after a meditation retreat last week. It resonated on several levels, but what’s relevant here is that I developed a better understanding of reflection.
Based on the teacher’s instructions, it seemed that I’d actually been practicing reflection for a long time, before I ever started meditating. I described to her my process of lying on the couch and letting my mind sink, and she confirmed that this was indeed what she’d been talking about.
100-year-old water well in Argentina, lined with hand-laid bricks. Photo: Carlos Ponte
Reflection, at least in this sense, isn’t thinking. It’s like putting a question into your mind and then holding it there while looking down a well to see if anything floats up out of the shaft. The trick is learning to train your attention on the empty space inside the well, without letting your intellect fill
it up with a lot of ideas.
What eventually surfaces can be an image, a word, or a phrase. In the case of this blog entry, it was both. I sat down and reflected in order to decide what to say here, and what came up was the phrase “reflection isn’t thinking.” I starting writing that down, and the well image followed before I had finished.
Reflection is a powerful tool for me. I use it to solve all sorts of problems, not just writing problems—for example, to figure out what’s really going on when something upsets me, so I can respond effectively, or to make tough decisions. What I understand now is that although this process is related to meditation, there’s a difference, which has to do with intention. Problem-solving reflection is goal oriented. Meditation is not. I was concerned that the one might be contaminating the other. But the teacher gave me some advice that works in either case: don’t let the reflection tip over into obsession. The acid test is falling into repetition: the same thoughts cycle back over and over, and you can’t let them go. The well shaft doesn’t stay empty—it overflows.
Writer’s block? Foolproof trick for breaking through
… At least it always works for me. I generally freeze up when I’m afraid I don’t have the chops for whatever the job is: an article that requires synthesizing interviews about a topic I don’t feel totally in control of (especially if one of the people I spoke to intimidated me); a book chapter whose concepts are so complex that I fear I’ll never be able to fit them together in a satisfactory way.
So I tell myself that I’ll just sit down and write something. It doesn’t matter whether the copy is any good, since it doesn’t count —it’s just for practice. This little maneuver relieves the pressure, and I do produce “something.” If I’m lucky my energy starts moving, I get connected, and the “practice” turns into a productive session. Even if it doesn’t, and what I write turns out not so great, I put it away and don’t look at it for a day or so. In the meantime, I’ve given my unconscious a chunk of material to work with. When I revisit my copy, either I discover it’s halfway decent or I suddenly know how to really do it right.
The funny thing is that this trick has saved me time and again, even though I’m totally aware that it’s a stratagem I’m using on myself. It breaks through whatever the resistance or the fear is. I don’t know exactly why—I’m just grateful.
Structuring a book = working a jigsaw puzzle
My years as a manuscript editor taught me how to structure a book. Many authors are experts with great info to impart, but when they try to produce a book they end up with a shapeless mess. Book writing is a craft, a professional specialty, like making violins.
For the past few months I’ve been working with a client who has terrific material and a clear idea of what she wants to say—in general. But she’d only written articles and hadn’t a clue about how to put everything together into a book.
I began by making her do an outline. Now we’re working through the chapters, honing the concepts for each one. It’s making her brain sweat. She knows her data, but has never thought her ideas through at this level of detail. When you work on the scale of a book, you need to create connections that never come up when you’re only presenting a bit of your data in an article. A comment in chapter 5 seems to conflict with a piece of evidence already presented in chapter 3. Are they really contradictory, or did you just not realize all the implications of that piece of data? It’s in actually working with the text that you really figure out what you mean to say.
- Years ago I went with a friend to hear Grace Paley speak. Paley talked about how she wrote one of her short stories, explaining that she found out what the story was about by writing it. My friend was baffled. She has a capacious, logical mind and had produced her own book by creating a conceptual structure based on her research, organizing all her notes, then writing everything out. But my own process—even though I write nonfiction—is like Paley’s: it’s through struggling with the connections of the clauses in a sentence, then the sequence of ideas among the sentences themselves, that I learn what I really mean to say.
I explained to my client that putting together a book is like working a jigsaw puzzle—when you get everything properly arranged, the pieces all fall into place with a click and the structure is solid. In an extended piece of writing, the structure—the organization of ideas—is actually itself a concept. All the subsidiary concepts in the separate chapters must fit snugly into this overall conceptual structure. When they do, the argument is not only clear, but pleasing.
- Tip: repetitive passages are always a sign that something is wrong with the overall conceptual structure. Reorganize your presentation of ideas, and the repetition will vanish.
For me, putting the puzzle together is another part of the pleasure of writing: first, sinking into intense concentration, seeing deeply into your material, and shaping your concepts to agree with it; then, fitting everything into place with that aesthetically satisfying click!
The role of pleasure
I spent last weekend at a meditation retreat receiving instruction in a technique that uses the breath to develop concentration. It was more technical than any practice I’d learned before—structured and specific, moving from step 1 to step 4 (as far as we got in two days, though the technique itself goes to step 16). The method (called anapanasati) is designed to develop concentration, the ability to focus the mind on one particular object (in this case, the breath) and keep it there. Concentration is said to make wisdom possible (“wisdom” meaning “perception of the true nature of reality”).
I went because I’d had a brief experience of this technique that had a powerful effect on me, so I thought I should learn more of it. Whether I develop greater powers of concentration and thereby wisdom is still to be seen (and indeed, beside the point, as I explain below); but what’s relevant here is a comment by the teacher that struck me.
Concentration is hard work, he said, but this work of developing a skill is inherently joyful—more so than achieving a finished result. This is literally true, because once you get to step 3, you begin to move energy through the body, developing a physical sensation called piti (classically translated “rapture,” though a more realistic description of my experience would be “pleasure”). In step 4, you develop sukha, an emotional state translated as “contentment” or indeed, “joy.” So it is actually the process that creates the pleasure, not achieving the goal.
So it is with writing. To be totally immersed, with your whole being, in creating a form that expresses the most profound awareness you’re capable of is deeply pleasurable. I once said something like this to a woman I knew from a writing class, adding rhetorically, “What could be more satisfying?”
She responded, “A roll in the hay!”
“But that goes away the next day!” I exclaimed. “The other doesn’t.”
I realized later that she was probably just trying to show off a little. But my instinctive response made me understand my own experience more clearly. In fact, I find even writing that doesn’t emerge from the depths of my being to be highly enjoyable. The next entry will enlarge on that.
The sky of mind: vast like space
Buddhist meditators practice experiencing the mind as a vast, clear sky, through which thoughts, feeings, and all other experiences pass like clouds, appearing and then vanishing in an open space of awareness that’s not limited to the inside of the head. (Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes this practice here.)
Kandinsky’s painting Sky Blue combines that image of the mind as vast open sky with an experience I’ve had when writing at a very deep level. Part of the conceptual work for my books about homeless women and about sacrifice was simply discovering what they were actually about. I came across incidents, articles, and books, and generated images from my imagination, that I knew were important, but I didn’t know why, or what exactly they meant. And normal-type thinking about them didn’t help. Read more
Giving up Henry James
As a young writer I aspired to write sentences like Henry James: long and beautifully elaborated, spinning out subtle, complicated perceptions. At the time I was trying to write fiction and attended classes taught by Marguerite Young (most famously, author of the novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling), who gave us a terrific exercise:
- Write a sentence at least a page long. You can use semicolons, dashes, whatever punctuation you want, but it has to be grammatical and it has to keep going.
This exercise had amazing effects. The effort to continue the sentence forced you to push your ideas way beyond what you had originally conceived. People developed wild, intense elaborations of character and action. And through the rhythms that occurred within their sentences, they discovered their own original voice.
What Marguerite didn’t teach, though, was discipline (Miss Mackintosh is over a thousand pages long). Read more
Practice and inspiration
The notion of practice is a funny combination of the mundane and the transcendent. Disciplined meditation practice leads over time to a level of skill that supports the development of wisdom, or insight into what Buddhists call emptiness, the interconnectedness of everything. And long practice of the pragmatic necessities of making a living turns out to be a foundation for writing that goes beyond mundane.
All these years, I thought I was just slogging through various writing jobs, some really interesting and some pretty boring. Turns out it was like physical exercise. Read more