Writing from the Shadowland of the Human Condition

There is a wonderful quote by the Roman, Seneca. He says, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I think that is such a powerful quote. If we are to find our true voice as writers, we cannot be afraid of the dark side of the human condition. What is really powerful writing is writing that explores the shadowlands of the human soul. We all have dark and we all have light within us. If you’re afraid to write about sex or you’re afraid to write about violence or you’re afraid to write about homosexuality –– if you’re afraid to write about anything, anything at all, then that’s stopping your creativity.

All aspects of the human condition have to be open to us. You can choose not to write about something, but there’s a big difference between choosing not to write about something and being afraid or actually unable to write about something.

As creative writers we need to explore all the primal passions; only then can we make choices in our writing.

Thoughts on the Inner Critic

Imagine your conscious mind is tuned in to a radio station run by a single disc jockey, your Inner Critic, and you have no way to turn down the volume much less turn it off. In fact, you’ve grown so used to the constant talk from the Inner Critic, you hardly notice he’s ordering you about, commenting, passing judgment and evaluating just about everything you do or say; this is all so subtle and insidious that you don’t separate out the Inner Critic from other parts of you. The Inner Critic has become you—it seems as if the only time you can escape his badgering is when you sleep. There is a reason for this. When you sleep, your conscious mind shuts down. The dream state or intuitive right side of the brain, takes over.

The Inner Critic avoids the dream state like the plague. He can’t get a foothold in a place where there is no apparent logic, where things appear as images, feelings, sounds and colors. It should not be surprising, then, that your best stories, characters and plots, come from this place of dreams, where little is known and anything is possible

Interviewing Your Characters

Some Interviewing Questions:

1. How old are you?

2. What kind of work do you do?

3. Are you married?

4. Do you have any children?

5. Are you in a good relationship to your spouse or lover?

6. Have you ever been unfaithful?

7. Has your partner ever been unfaithful?

8. What kinds of things make you angry?

9. How do you express that anger?

10. You’re in a scene with someone who is making you very angry. Why? What’s making you angry?

11. What memory does the scene bring up?

12. What memory does the memory bring up?

CREATIVE WRITING IS EXPERIENTIAL

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with writing. The answer is both simple and complex, and further elucidates why creative writing is not about language. It is about experience and feelings, and where do experience and feelings lie? In the body. Nothing is more human than the body, and few things are more confounding than the passions that lie within: everything from the tenderest love to the most murderous rage. Therefore, if as writers we are to explore and express the human condition, we must approach our task through the body, not through the mind. Through experience, not through words. Which doesn’t mean you have to go out and literally experience everything you write about. That’s what the imagination is for. You imagine and the characters unleashed from your creative unconscious live the life and through them, you live it, too.

Dorsey, one of my students, put it this way:

When I began to write, I wrote about personal experiences that would have shriveled my mother’s toes. Like how I sliced my forehead with a razor (just a little bit) when I was ten years old, how I ran away, and how I suffered with a cancer operation. But alas, there was a limit to my experiences. Then Emily explained how I could tell limitless stories with fiction. I could be savage, coy, or seductive. I could be a throat slitter, a convent girl, or a dull dowager. I could be all those things so unmentionable when I was growing up. Emily spoke of finding the passion of the characters. It made me want to twist my fingers with embarrassment at first, those words—passion, lust, anger . . .

I would say that ninety percent of the people who come to me either do not know how to or are afraid to let out their passion. The other ten percent, who hurl themselves down the Rabbit Hole willy-nilly, have other problems to confront. Usually such people are very at home in the chaos of the unknown, but must struggle to get order.

My student, Dorsey, is a risk taker, and every writer I know who is successful is a risk taker. By success, I don’t mean they’ve made the best sellers list or even are able to sell their book or story. Success means they struggle, sometimes daily, with their demons and open to the passion of their writing. Success means they have found discipline that allows them to write through the blocks and survive the dry spells. Success means that they know in their heart that they are a writer and that, on most days, they love the writer within. They write despite the angst, they write for the joy, they write for the wonder, the experience and the surprises. They write because they are writers and they must write. They write because to write is to journey, to change, to grow. They write because for a writer it is in the writing that life is often lived most deeply.

All this is why writing is, at its core, experiential. And the truly miraculous part, I have discovered, is that when we brave the journey and open fully to our passions through our characters, we actually integrate those passions into ourselves. We expand as human beings. This is what I call writing as ritual. If we battle our Inner Critics, if we battle the inner demons, if we gather in the disowned parts of ourselves by merging with our characters, then we are actually, literally changed because of the journey. Passionate writing, writing that scares us witless, is transformative for the writer.

Fiction writing is not a linear process.

Fiction writing is not a linear process. To understand we have only to look at creativity itself.

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 cosmic landscape of the imagination where anything is possible.

However, the main problem I have seen in my thirty years of teaching fiction writing is over-dependence on the rational part of the equation. People want to get the story written and get it out. (Whatever that means?) The want to leap frog the process, get the words down on the page and finish the story. This is to symptomatic of the goal oriented society that we live in, a society that is striving upwards toward success instead of embracing the deeper, more powerful and life changing journey of descent that takes us into the creative realm of the true self.

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
Albert Einstein

Releasing the Creative Energy in Fiction Writing

What is good fiction writing technique? How do we unleash the creative energy through the channels of character and story? Although I teach technique, my emphasis has changed and the techniques themselves have shape shifted. I know now that the journey of the writer is first and foremost a journey of self-discovery, the path on which we can find essence and hear the song of our soul. Craft and technique are necessary, but the trick is to not put the cart before the horse. Technical expertise alone cannot release the writer's passion, and the perfectly turned phrase will please the ego, but if it doesn't translate into something meaningful for the character and story, it is so much wasted word count. Not that there's anything wrong with seeking the perfectly turned phrase. I do it myself. It's a great delight for the mind; the problem is when we confuse perfection of outer form with essence.

Both technique and passion are vital in many ways, but I've worked with writers who are technically excellent but can't plumb the depths of the human condition. Conversely, I've worked with writers who have great intuitive understanding of the task William Faulkner set forth for writers -- "... 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."-- but whose lack of technique flaws their story telling, sometimes to the point where they can't finish and give up in frustration.

But revealing the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself is, for most, the more difficult of the two tasks. If we are to succeed, we must leave our conscious self and all our mind's expectations and journey into the unknown, that place of shadows, mist, fertility and birth that knows neither right or wrong, that holds a truth beyond the mind's understanding. If we brave this journey, we will emerge from the mists and shadows into a landscape more vibrant than the one we left behind. Miraculously, we find ourselves writing the story we never thought we'd write, the story our minds could not conceive but our hearts hunger to write.