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!
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.
Image as analytic tool, part 2
I started out writing fiction—short stories and then an attempt at a novel. Then, without having planned to, I found myself committed to write a nonfiction book about “shopping bag ladies,” and when I sat down to think about what its focus might be, the image of the witch popped into my mind. At the time I was doing a Jungian analysis, which uses dream images to investigate the contents of the unconscious, so it was natural to me to follow the witch image wherever it led. This method felt not just congenial but deeply satisfying; right away, I was hooked. An image constrains and focuses thoughts while still allowing great freedom in moving around within it: you can come at your material from many different directions without losing coherence, since the analysis acquires its form from the structure of the image.
A witch and her familiar
I used this method for both my literary nonfiction books:
- For The Women Outside, a study of homeless and marginal women, the witch figure.
- For Slaying the Mermaid, about women and self-sacrifice, Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid.
The Little Mermaid, illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen for H.C. Andersen's fairy tale
While in the process of developing my witch image, and feeling doubtful whether using a single image to organize an entire book was really kosher (what about logic? rational analyis?), I asked a panelist at an academic seminar about it. She recommended a book called The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, by Jonathan D. Spence, a historian. It was an academic study of a Jesuit missionary in 16th- and 17-century China, who undertook to teach the Chinese the European system of building a “memory palace” or mental construct of images, a method in use since classical antiquity to help people organize and remember large amounts of information. Adapting the memory palace theme to his book, Spence built each chapter around an image, as expressed by a Chinese character. He didn’t use his images in quite the way I was using mine, but his book made me feel much more comfortable about what I was doing.
Actually an image like my witch or mermaid is rather like a memory palace in reverse. In the original version, you build your palace as a way to store specific data. You add one room after another, and as you create them, you furnish them with objects, attaching a particular datum to each object. You can store different categories of information in different rooms. To remember your information, in your mind’s eye you move through the rooms and look around at the furnishings.
For me the process is precisely reversed. The image is already there, and my job is to explore it. As I move through it, I discover new wings, levels, ells—all sorts of additions, which furnish new components and additional layers of meaning for the conceptual structure of my book. Either way, I think, images are magical.