Adapted from a chapter in my book, Movies in the Mind: How to Build a Short Story, a Writer's Digest Book Club "Classic" selection. One of its lines found its way into Reader's Digest's "Quotable Quotes" and ended up on the World Wide Web in languages I'd never heard of. Here it is in English: Good habits are just as hard to break as bad ones.
Let's say you've been working on a story. It's coming, but it's not coming fast enough. What will speed things up? Surprisingly: Doing nothing. Now's the time to partner with your unconscious for a week and to let it do the work for you.
This is often the hardest part of the writing process. An essential part of the creative process is to do just that-nothing. During this period, allow the unconscious to do its work. And, paradoxically, without any conscious effort on your part, your creative product will grow.The trick is to do nothing long enough for the work to come to fruition in your unconscious. But because this is hard, what follow are some tips for what to do when you're doing nothing; and how to do nothing so effectively that your story will pop from you full-blown.So, for the first tip: What to do when you're doing nothing.
It's always important to know where you're going, if you have any hope of reaching your goal. Here, the goal's a finished story that pops like Athena from the head of Zeus, and the only way to achieve this is through doing things that unclutter the unconscious sufficiently to allow it to devote full-time to the job.This is the time to cook, build a model, swim, play chess, hike, paint, play music, or repair a toaster-whatever it is that puts you into that "time out of time state," where you lose all track of time. What you're looking for are activities that allow you to immerse yourself in an experience without thought. Whatever takes you away from the ceaseless round of chatter unc1utters the unconscious. What works for you? Include it in your day, every day, because each day takes you through the same cycle of creativity in an abbreviated way.For me, painting is the best "immersion" activity. I can so lose myself in the process that when I stop, I discover surprisingly that hours have passed. While I'm painting, I'm not thinking. But I'm not floating in a sea of no-thought: I'm doing what Aldous Huxley thought so important he had birds in his fictional country in Island crying "Attention, attention, attention." I am focused in on what I'm doing with a highly concentrated attention.So that's what to do when you're doing nothing: anything that allows you to immerse yourself fully in the activity and at the same time challenges you enough, but not too much. Do anything, that is, but write. During this stage of the process, do anything but write-even one word. And, don't tell your story to anyone. Telling it will dissipate the energy. Keeping your story inside creates a pressurecooker sensation-eventually you will feel as though you're going to explode if you can't let your story out. And that's the sensation you're aiming for.
NOW for the second tip: How to do nothing so effectively that your story will pop from you full-blown. This is often the most fun, because it isn't so "hands-off' as immersion. You can really feel you're doing something to work with your unconscious even though you are letting go and trusting the unconscious to do the work for you. I call this active incubation, because you're building bridges between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
One of these bridges you probably know well: How often have you said, "Let me sleep on it"? It's one of the best problem-solving tools we have. And it works for writing so well that I've come to believe that I couldn't write a darn thing worth publishing if I couldn't sleep on it. I'll go to sleep unclear of how to proceed in a story and wake in the morning with the answer.You can also build bridges during your waking hours. Either way, it's still the same process: You have to silence your analytical mind long enough to let the unconscious speak. You have probably had a few such experiences: Names you couldn't remember an hour before come to you as soon as you get into the mind-numbing rhythm of vacuuming, or as you're washing the car, you recall what it is you forgot to buy at the store. I make use of active incubation every day I write. I don't take a shower until I get stuck in my writing stint for the day, because invariably it's in the shower that ideas pop up. My writing journals are filled with "shower thought" notations.
Other things that shift me from that "stuck" analytical place also include water: I love to sit by a waterfall or any running water--even the fountains in shopping malls will do. Find your own. Some writers get unstuck sitting by a fire; some with candlelight; some while they meditate. Others can't write if they aren't driving. One of my students puts Grieg on the car stereo and drives across the desert, preferably during lightning storms. Any activity that stops analytical thought lets inspiration surface. And just a suggestion: Always keep a small notebook with you, so you won't forget your breakthroughs-write them down!But there's more to active incubation than just getting out of your own way. This is the time to work actively with your unconscious. One way to do that is through what I call a "nightly recap." Lie in bed in the dark and try to visualize your story as clearly as possible; let all the details come alive for you. Summon the smells, tastes, textures, emotions, sounds. Make them as vivid as you can. You may find yourself in a state similar to Robert Louis Stevenson's, who was thrashing about in his bed one night, greatly alarming his wife. She woke him up, infuriating Stevenson, who yelled, "I was dreaming a fine bogey tale!" The nightmare from which he had been unwillingly awakened was the premise for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.When you wake in the morning after such nightly recaps, don't get out of bed. Stay there, moving only to pick up your already open notebook and uncapped pen. Write without thinking-anything about your story that comes to mind. Write for at least five minutes before you get up. Then close your notebook without reading what you've written. You'll read it later-when this period of doing nothing comes to an end. To read it too soon flips you into analytical thought."Silent movies" is another technique that helps build the pressure. Set a timer for ten minutes, and then sit without thinking until the timer rings. If thoughts do come, just let them move through your mind; don't hold onto them. Stay still. For the next ten minutes, see your story as a movie in your mind. Make it as vivid as you can; flesh out the details. Go back and forth, back and forth. S top the projector, reverse the film, run it forward again. See it more and more clearly each time it reels by. Watch, but do not let yourself write-no matter how strong the urge.
Finally, for the last ten minutes, sit quietly without consciously thinking, until your urge to write is so strong that you just can't resist it. Then, and only then, pick up your pen and write.Make these silent movies as often as you can during the days of this period of doing nothing. If you can't spend a full thirty minutes on it, cut back to five-minute segments. Remember: Don't read anything you write.
THERE'S another aspect to this part of the creative process that's often given short shrift: solitude. Give yourself time alone each day, even if it's only to take a walk. A quiet walk alone can help your writing more than you'll ever know.
What if you do all this, and no story seems ready to pop into your head? In his autobiography, Education of a Wandering Man, Louis L'Amour said,
There are so many wonderful stories to be written, and so much material to be used. When I hear people talking of writer's block, I am amazed. Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing, and it will.
That's every writer's secret: not waiting for the muse. Give yourself a week at most to do nothing, then sit down to write.Set yourself a schedule, and give yourself a goal. When I was writing fiction full-time, my writing hours were 7:00 a.m. till noon. My goal was to write five pages per day. Sometimes I finished the five pages before noon, and then I was free to stop. Sometimes I finished the five pages by noon, but even if I hadn't, I still stopped. It's a goal, not a stick.When your writing is coming easily, it feels too good to stop. I rarely would stop if I had finished my five pages before noon, for instance. But I always remembered advice that came from a Paris Review interview with Ernest Hemingway. Although he wrote only in the morning, he said he would make a point of stopping before he'd written everything that was in him that day to write. It's great advice. If you know what's going to happen in the next scene, it'll prime your pump the following day.Become aware of your own pattern. You may work best doing sixteen-hour-a-day stints for three weeks straight. Or you may find you can write only one hour a day without exhausting yourself. So schedule an hour and set a goal of a page a day. Even if you write only five days a week, you'n stin have produced 260 pages in one year. That's a whole book! The important thing is to find your own pattern-and then make it a habit. Good habits are just as hard to break as bad ones.
Rollo May's message in The Courage to Create is that for the creative person, fear never goes away. How can it? When we're working with the unconscious, as we must do in writing fiction, we walk up to the abyss every day and jump in. A very scary process! Allow yourself time to sharpen pencils or stare out the window for ten minutes or so before you start. After that, stay in your chair until your allotted hours are up, whether you've written anything or not. You'll find that the sheer boredom of doing nothing is often a' catalyst to a remarkable gush of words.
© 1997, 1998 by Colleen Mariah Rae
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