The Dance of Creativity
Creativity is a subtle and magnificent dance between the rational and the intuitive, between the left and right parts of the brains, between technique and imagination. Both partners in this dance are absolutely necessary and are needed in equal proportion, which means that imagination is not more important than technique and visa versa. If you only live in the imagination, you will never get organized, you will never complete your story. However, if you start from the rational, linear, organizational part of the process, ( ie. Gotta have the perfect opening sentence and first paragraph… better yet, an outline…) you will never fall into the rich, passionate imagination or what has been called the “great seething sea of the unconscious”.
However, the main problem I have seen in my twenty-five years of teaching fiction writing is over-dependence on the rational part of the equation. A prime example of this is the adage, “Write what you know.”
Write what you know? How boring! Especially for the fiction writer. As Gertrude Stein said, “What will be best in your writing is what you really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”
Paradoxically, when we write from the imagination we are writing what we “know” but from such a deep level of knowing that we don’t know that we know it until it is revealed in our writing. This is often the truer aspect of self, often the part that we do not readily show to the world, and sometimes do not show even to our self – at least not consciously.
So how do we access the deeper knowing? Remember I said that creativity is a dance between the known and unknown, the rational and intuitive. Here’s a perfect example of the give and take of the dance: start with the known but use it as a jumping off point, as a doorway into the unconscious. The key is not to be slavish to the known. This is especially true when you are working with autobiography, where what is “known” is largely based on memory. And memory is often faulty. In addition, autobiography is only your point of view. How about alternative points of view?
Here’s an exercise: take an incident from your life in which you are absolutely certain that you are the injured party. The easiest way to do this is to use an argument or a fight, which automatically holds dramatic tension.
1. See the argument or fight in your mind’s eye as a scene from a movie.
2. Write the scene keeping to your point of view (POV).
3. Put that scene aside and write another scene, this time using the other person’s point of view.
Remember that writing from the other person’s POV means that you disregard your POV. It is the other person’s inner thoughts and feelings that count. In this version, your feelings can be expressed only through dialogue and action.
It is important to be clear on point of view, which means getting inside the main character’s head, heart and gut, literally seeing the world through the character’s POV. So when you are in the “bad guy’s” POV, be as true to that POVas you are to your own. An excellent example of this is Crime and Punishment where Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov, who is not a criminal, put an ax into his landlady’s head. Thus begins one of the greatest novel ever written. Did Dostoevsky have to put an ax into anyone’s head to write this? Clearly not. And neither do you. But Dostoevsky needed to experience Raskolnikov’s physical journey as a murderer as well as his emotional journey from darkness to redemption.
William Faulkner wrote: “... the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself... alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the sweat and the agony.”
Faulkner has given us a tough assignment, yet it is an assignment at which we much excel as fiction writers. The best way to succeed at this is to leave behind what you believe to be “true” and open yourself to the vast possibility of life experiences outside your own. As writers, we access the imagination, that cosmic place where everything is possible and the great expanse of human emotions resides.
How do we do this? Here are some suggestions:
1. Take chances. Be a risk taker.
2. Learn to be at home amidst the unknown.
3. Trust that order will ultimately arise out of chaos.
4. Write without needing your writing to make immediate sense.
5. Think of something you could never write about and then write about it.
6. Find people, a community where you can find non-judgmental support for your creativity.
7. Understand that writing from the imagination, “making up things” doesn’t mean that you’re childish, or worse, crazy. Know that in the cosmic realm of the imagination, you will find the truths passions, characters and stories for which your creativity hungers.
To end, I offer you this from Thomas Wolfe, a natural swimmer in the seething sea of the unconscious:
“It was a process that began in a whirling vortex and creative chaos and that proceeded
slowly at the expense of infinite confusion, toil and error toward clarification and the
articulation of an ordered and formal structure.”
For more exercises, explore my workbook,
The Art of Fiction Writing
