[Writerpreneur] Day 10 Lesson 0202: Building a Storehouse of Inspirations to Write From
In order to race our writing engines, we need to top off our subconscious fuel tanks.
In all of us, lying asleep in the subconscious mind, there is a host of memories.
These are images out of our experience, the entire range of impressions, sensations, and ideas which we have gathered during our lives.
There they lie sleeping until something knocks at the door and rouses one of them.
Now, if we hope to have abundant supplies of such memories and ideas and images lying in our subconscious mind, we should be both sensitive and discriminative.
So that we lose nothing in our experience, nothing wasted.
If we are people of that sort, we can jam and pack our subconscious mind with materials that we can use.
The second part of the process—the knock at the door which rouses one of these memories—is not always a matter over which we have control.
Thus, in Poe, we find hardly more than a single knock which would awaken any vivid memory, or cause any rush of images into his mind. No doubt Poe had no control over this, perhaps knew no other way to unlock the materials of his art. But he had the sense to fully use it when it happened.
The third step in this creative process—the sorting out of the images which come pouring through the door from the subconscious to the conscious mind—is partly a matter of deliberate choice, partly a matter of instinctive or conditioned response.
For example, you may reject some images because you naturally recoil from them, or simply because you know the editor will never let them pass.
But fortunately, very often, the ones he should choose force themselves upon him and then he finds himself forced to use them; the awakened ideas and images come alive, and he goes more or less willing to work with them. Every writer with a stored subconscious mind of vivid images will have this experience occasionally.
The fourth step in the creative process is one which the writer has better under control. In this his conscious mind, his imagination, takes charge, and strives to organize the materials he has chosen into a pattern, a plan which it has visioned, or which he has deliberately decided upon.
Here is the place for craftsmanship, for all the skill and patience and labor of which the writer is capable. Here the technique of writing is of use.
The secret of writing well comes down to two principles:
First, to store your mind well with vivid memories, and to learn the “open sesame” which will unlock that hoard of precious materials.
Second, to understand what you are about well enough to make the right choice among your treasures of experience, and to arrange them effectively when you have chosen them.
You can achieve all these things by allowing your mind some freedom to form associations for itself and thrusting upward the things which most concern you.
And since controlling the subconscious is mostly beyond our command, a person must spend most of their effort upon the last two steps of the process of creation...
(From the works of Walter S. Campbell)