from August 8, 2015

Sue Woolfe, novelist and teacher of creative writing, asks “What are we doing in our minds, those of us who spend years sitting in rooms making up stories?”

Here are some of her questions and answers:

“Sometimes I feel guided, though I don’t know by what…” (1, p. 3).

“…I had long been aware that while I write fiction, I seem to be using my brain in a very different way from when I’m not—and differently from when I read. For example, I seem to ‘watch’ an imaginary scene in my mind’s eye as I write about it…” (1, p, 16).

“…a well-received story…logically develops and explores a moral principle…Most readers and critics would assume the moral principle was the starting point, indeed the aim, of the whole endeavor. However…these thematic principles are often not intended but discovered by writers during or even just on finishing the creation, not before the creation. But how could that be?” (1, p. 17).

How does an author create “complex fictional works of unpremeditated coherence?” (1, p. 26).

“…students often speak with excitement and awe about the power and autonomy of characters they’d previously considered playthings…

“…characters in their settings become insistent—insistent because the characters begin to enter unbidden into my conscious thoughts even when I’m not working. I ‘see’ characters over time far more clearly than I had previously, and far more clearly than if I had daydreamed them” (1, pp. 28-29).

“After all, what is consciousness? I assume that we all have an interior commentary that chatters on and on, like a voice-over narration in a film” (1, p. 40).

[I don’t have a commentator, but Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow did. He was quoted in my post of November 15, 2014 as saying: “I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me.”]

“As a child I’d lived much of the time in my imagination, so I’d always thought of it as my confidante” (1, p. 49).

“Plato thought that a poet is able to create only what the muse dictates…” (1, p. 49).

“Much of the work of fiction writing depends on first finding and then learning to maintain a voice. For readers…It is the personality they sense inside the writing…Writers—all those I have spoken to, at least—consider it essential to ‘find’ a voice…; in fact, the voice is considered so privotal that commonly if a group of writers at a bar are recounting their problems, and one of them says that he or she cannot fine the voice for the current work, everyone murmurs in sympathy…

“…there is , for me at least, an almost visceral sensation that the voice will lead me through the story, that the voice already knows the story though I don’t…

As a novelist friend said, “There was an element of magic about writing the book. There were times when I felt in direct relation to that voice, that the book was—as they say—‘writing itself’ through me…[The character’s] voice felt very natural to me, although it’s not a voice I ever use in my own life. In taking on that persona—that voice, actually—I discovered an astonishing freedom. Perhaps that’s the compulsion of writing: the freedom to be, not somebody else, but another of your selves” (1, pp. 60-61).

“A character seems for a very long time into fictional work to be not a character but a boon companion to the author, a fellow muser, a consciousness about any number of subjects. Even if the character’s outlook is counter to the writer’s usual views, even if he or she is morally repugnant, there is a conviction of a shared understanding of the world—the character seems like a person the writer could possibly have become” (1, pp. 69-70).

“…the state of trance I induce when I write, a trance so profound that I lose track of my physical whereabouts, my sense of time, my sense of myself and even my own name, so that I am, for instance, barely able to remember what a telephone is, let alone coherently answer an interrupting phone call. In my experience, very little material written in the trance state, or written while emerging from it, is discarded—even though in the early stages of the writing process, when I go into the trance, I have no idea the subject matter or concerns of the eventual novel” (1, p. 93).

“This is a very personal search. It does not pretend to be anything other than the investigation of a novelist baffled by her own creative processes and seeking to understand them, the better to have faith in their worth and to articulate them to others” (1, Preface).

1. Sue Woolfe. The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A writer looks at creativity and neuroscience. Crawley, University of Western Australia Press, 2007.