Channel Your Subconscious

Nigh-universal advice for writers (2/4)

Many writing-advice-givers will tell you that you can’t just think your way into writing fiction, you’ve got to do something a lot more subtle and magical than that. Storytelling not a process you can fully do while you’re aware and awake and logical. You have to tune into your subconscious.

This is probably the most baffling part of all of storycraft to me. I don’t get it at all. But an awful lot of people agree that it’s critically important, and I don’t want to ignore them. Other authors I admire say they never channel their subconscious at all, though, so at the same time I’m not taking the idea as drop-dead mandatory. Mostly I just want to try to figure out what’s here, and whether it’s for me.

What I want to do, as always, is build a working model of what the subconscious-enthusiasts mean, what the moving parts of the process are, how they fit together and what results I can expect if it’s all working. (I note that the most woo of the subconscious-channelers would probably say that “building working models” is itself antithetical to the channeling of the subconscious and that I’m coming at this entirely the wrong way. So be it — I’m going to try anyway.)

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So what do they mean, “the subconscious?”

I think they mean that there’s more than one way to use your brain. Probably nobody believes there’s a strict dichotomy or even a smooth spectrum, but for the sake of laying out a framework, we’ll describe exactly two modes.

In analytical mode, you have access to reason, cognition, and logic. You form cleverly constructed layers of abstraction. It’s symbol manipulation. It’s like assembling a puzzle with no pieces left over: your thoughts are neat, tidy, and orderly. There’s a sense of detachment, of observing from the outside.

In subconscious mode, you have access to dreams, feelings, sensations. There are little bits of concreteness that don’t necessarily fit into a cohesive whole. There’s uncertainty, ambiguity, and messiness. Your experience is vivid, visceral. You are immersed and absorbed.

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And what do they mean, when they say to “channel the subconscious?”

Well, they definitely don’t all mean the same thing. There are multiple schools of thought. I’m sure I haven’t captured them all, nor have I really understood any of them properly. Here are my clumsy attempts, probably full of misunderstandings and holes, to share what I’ve gleaned.

School one holds that ideas exist in the ether, independent of humans. If you want ideas, you need to open yourself up to these free-agent ideas, get out of their way, and let them flow through you onto the page.

School two holds that ideas exist deep within your own mind, but they are hard to access directly, so you need to go into a dreamlike state to let them swim up to the surface where you can access them.

School three holds that you can only create art when you observe and interact with the physical world at the sensory level, without abstracting away all of the detail and starting to manipulate symbols. You have to stay in contact with reality.

And then I guess there’s school four, which probably lives in harmony with multiple of the other schools, that says that it is the writer’s job to do the work of abstraction, but to do it very well, in a maximally truth-preserving way.

Let’s expand on each of those.

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School One: Ideas Exist in the Ether

If ideas exist independent of humans, then the subconscious is merely the way we ferry them from ideaspace into our mundane world.

Here are a couple of examples from that school of thought, starting with Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way:

Most writers have had the experience of catching a poem or a paragraph or two of formed writing. We consider these finds to be small miracles. What we fail to realize is that they are, in fact, the norm. We are the instrument more than the author of our work. Michelangelo is said to have remarked that he released David from the marble block he found him in. “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through,” said Jackson Pollock. When I teach screenwriting, I remind my students that their movie already exists in its entirety. Their job is to listen for it, watch it with their mind’s eye, and write it down. The same may be said of all art. If painting and sculptures wait for us, then sonatas wait for us; books, plays, and poems wait for us, too. Our job is simply to get them down. To do that, we drop down the well. Some people find it easier to picture the stream of inspiration as being like radio waves of all sorts being broadcast at all times.

Even though it sounds slightly unhinged to me, I admit I get a kick out of the idea that “the movie already exists in its entirety.” Julia Cameron and Ludwig Boltzmann would have plenty to talk about.

Cameron’s not alone in this idea. Here’s Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic:

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.

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When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. Mostly, you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration.

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You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention. And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?”

If ideas really exist independent of the thoughts of humans — or independent of the thoughts of sentient beings, more generally — then I have several additional questions about the nature of our universe.

I admit I just don’t buy this theory. I think it may be a useful fiction, a productive stance to take as an artist, because in this school, it is necessary to quiet the turmoil in your own mind before you can hear the idea that’s trying to get your attention. Settling down and grounding yourself is likely to help you do good work.

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School Two: The Nooks and Crannies of the Mind

In this school, the great ideas exist deep within you, but it’s hard for you access them directly. You need a way of letting them surface. From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler, describes one way that might look.

…You’re going to do what I call dreamstorming— not brainstorming, dream- storming. You’re going to sit or recline in your writing space in your trance, and you’re going to free- float, free- associate, sit with your character, watch your character move around in the potential world of this novel. You’re going to dream around in this novel, one level removed from moment- to- moment writing— that is, at the level of scene. You’re going to do this for six or eight or ten or twelve weeks, every day.

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You’ll have a pad of paper in front of you (you can do it at your computer if you prefer; I do it by hand on legal pads); you’ll make a list. You’re going to write down on this legal pad six or eight or ten words, not many more, that represent a potential scene. Just identifiers of scenes. Don’t hesitate to put something down, as long as it’s coming with a sensual hook.

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Then you write down the briefest identifier of that scene. … And when a compelling scene comes to you, you might be visited by the draft writer’s instinct— you want to start writing the full scene right away. Don’t do it. Resist it. Even if that scene is “Wow! It’s vivid. It’s got, oh man, it’s really almost there.” You’ve got the six- or eight- word identifier and you leave it at that. This is coitus interruptus. You float on.

How is this different from brainstorming, or from planning and outlining and cranking out a novel, scene by scene?

It seems to me that the subconscious is, here, like a skittish little feral animal, and if we want to find out what it has to say we have to be extremely patient with it. Butler is saying that we have to interact with it on its own terms. We can’t direct the subconscious at chapter nine, scene three and say “Okay, say some artistic shit about Frank’s desperation. Ready, set, go.” Instead, we have to let it wander, and see where it wants to go.

I am willing to believe that this works for some people, but I still push against it, because it seems very expensive! Six to twelve weeks of this kind of work sounds like a lot to me. Perhaps it’s not too much to pay for an experienced, expert writer of literary fiction, but given my quasi-indifferent stance to fiction writing, this toll is too much to pay. I think that if I were to try dreamstorming, it would feel indistinguishable from fucking around and wasting time. Your mileage, as always, may vary!

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School Three: Art Arises from Naturalism

I talked to my friend Logan Strohl about channeling the subconscious. Logan is my favorite person to talk to about these things because he’s spent a lot of time — much more than I have — in close contact with the rationalist community that I call home, while at the same time being far more comfortable than I am with mysticism, spirituality, and the subconscious. He recently blogged about his own relationship with his subconscious self:

I think it’s because the conscious intellect interacts with the world at a much greater distance than the subconscious does. The conscious mind is all about reflection, analysis, extracting what is relevant and tidying things up for ease of symbolic manipulation. Art comes from contact with the world. You’ve gotta make that contact using a part of your mind whose job is not to summarize and understand and make things fit. So it has to be the subconscious.

You can use your conscious mind to choose your fishing site, and even the bait. Those choices are craft, are skill. But you’ve gotta wade into the water with your whole body, and you just can’t be sure what will bite, or when. You can only wade in, over and over. You can only make an offering of your soul.

I didn’t check with Logan about the rest of what I’m about to say, so please don’t take the rest of this as his point of view, but here’s how I’m conceptualizing it.

When you live your real, actual life in the real, actual physical world, all you have to go on is the sensory input that comes in through your eyes, ears, skin, and so on. You make meaning out of that sensory input. Your brain processes the input, running it up the ladder of inference — filtering the data, interpreting it, mixing in assumptions and prior beliefs, drawing conclusions, and updating beliefs. That’s what it is to live as a human in the physical world.

What, then is a story?

When you read or hear a story, you imagine another world. Someone else tells you bits and pieces: descriptions of sensory data, already filtered, partially interpreted. You simulate living in that world, receiving that sensory data, adopting those half-formed interpretations. But then you fill in the rest yourself, you do the rest of the interpreting and concluding. You do the meaning-making.

A story plucks at the strings of your internal meaning-making machine, in the same way that living in physics does, but it does so purely conceptually, it hooks in a little higher on the ladder of inference.

To be a writer, to do a good job of this —

You have to be able to project a physical world, the kind of world that is rich with sensory data that is coherent, that builds back up in another human mind and becomes something that feels real to them. And if you write human characters, you have to be able to simulate those characters, and how they move around in that rich world of your imagination. You have to be able to write about what they notice and feel and think, and have all of that be mostly coherent too.

And actually, that’s a lie, you have to do something even harder than that. You have to convey something that is not all that rich sensory data, because that would be way too vast. Instead you have to give just a little bit, with words, that gives the impression of vast sensory data. You do have to filter it, but in a way that feels true, neutral, maximally unfiltered.

So for the writer, maybe “channel the subconscious” means to drop down deliberately into the lower rungs of the ladder of inference, definitely in real life and maybe also in dream or in fantasy, and hang out there. Don’t let yourself go up the rungs and do the interpretation and abstraction. Just gather your impressions and your sense-data as raw ingredients and let them be.

Then, use those raw ingredients in your art, as unprocessed as possible. When you do this, you’ll be sharing something more real and cohesive and right than anything you could cook up at the symbolic layer of your mind, and the people who see your art will see right through you and straight to reality, and they will be moved.

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School Four: Make the Subconscious Conscious

Perhaps my favorite take of them all comes from Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird:

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

I adore this framing. If I’m understanding her correctly — and I acknowledge that maybe I have missed her entirely — we do want to dredge through the muck and silt that is at the bottom of our bowl of mental soup, we want to go digging around in there with a spoon and see what unidentifiably gloopy chunks we find down there. But then, when we find a chunk, we want to rinse it off and make sense of it. What have we found? Is it animal, mineral, or vegetable? And probably in the process of washing and identifying the gloopy bits, we wash away a bit too much. The slime and the lack of definition mattered, and the clean and sharply defined object we now behold on our spoon is no longer really quite the thing that lived in the muck.

Even so, I find value in the exercise, enough that I do it over and over. Once I’ve retrieved my precious new object from the muck and washed it off, I hold it up and look at it and ask myself, is it still the thing? Or what is it missing, now that it’s so clean and catalogued? And then I go back down into the muck and try again to find the real object, the thing I originally made contact with. And in weaving back and forth between the two worlds, I eventually arrive at something a little bit like the truth, but that I can hold in my reasoning mind.

It gets even worse, of course, when then I try to explain any of this to other people, with their own silty soup full of their own exotic ingredients. More and more is lost in the translation process.

But I try anyway, because it’s the only way I know to connect with anyone else at all and feel a little less alone in the big black universe.

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In the end, I think all of these approaches have something in common. They’re about how to say something real and true and beautiful in its messiness. They’re about a distrust of the neat lopping-off of corners and edges that comes with abstraction and symbolic manipulation.

I also think this is an important move to learn to make, whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction. It might even be more important in non-fiction. I lopped off corners all over the place in this very essay. I told you that ways of thinking were not a binary, and then gave you a binary model anyway! I gave you four schools of thought, when surely this is a very bad approximation of reality! In the process of trying to tell you how to be real, I presented a bunch of fake wind-up toys for your consideration. I admit it!

So now I will do my best to collapse the fake frameworks back down into something that’s more real.

Whether you arrive at truthtelling in your writing by acting as a humble servant of an idea-overlord, by sitting in a recliner and not writing for twelve weeks, by wading in a stream, or none of the above – well, I think you just have to try it and see what actually works. It may or may not feel like “channeling the subconscious” in the end. The important thing is to keep trying to see more clearly, to reject rounding off, until you’re not spouting bullshit any more.

And when I’m not spouting bullshit, I can feel it. It feels different, in a very physical and woo way. It feels like a vibration or a thrum in my chest. I get excited. I can play “warmer” or “colder” with it, as I write.

I don’t think it lives outside of me, I think it is me. I think the thrumming could easily still be incorrect, in that I could be writing information that does not match reality. But the thrumming means something. It means I’m saying what I believe.

I guess that’s my subconscious. I found it after all.

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