[Writerpreneur OS] Day 15 - Lesson 0207: The Creative Process - The Deliberate Choice
Now that you know how to train by reading other author's successful works, it's time to put your knowledge to use...
Writing to be read is the object of every writer who aspires to be known as a professional.
Writers differ in many ways, but one thing may be safely asserted of all successful writers: they write. And if you really wish to write — get to work.
That is the first and fundamental rule: To write well, you must write a great deal.
The second fact which may safely be asserted concerning all writers is that their mental, their imaginative processes, are much the same. These processes are not peculiar to poets and men of letters; all mankind employs them.
In all of us, lying asleep in the subconscious mind, there is a host of memories, images out of our past experience, the whole 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.
Then that one springs awake, rushes to the door, and leaps through it into the conscious mind, dragging with it all manner of other images and ideas which have some connection established through the association of ideas.
A stream of related but unorganized memories rushes into our conscious mind. If we let them run out as they please, we say we are day-dreaming.
But if we are artists, writers of imagination, if we are intent upon some pattern or device, we discipline these helter-skelter images and ideas. Some we drive back through the door, others we toss aside, those which can be made to conform to our design we marshal into some kind of order, until we have them marching together in a common purpose.
Thus we achieve our pattern, fulfill our design, and create our work of art. Or, rather, our shaping imagination does it for us.
Now it follows that, if we hope to have abundant supplies of such memories and ideas and images, our subconscious mind will be jammed and packed with materials of which we can make 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. Every writer can examine the ideas in his work, identify those ideas and those impulses which unlock his subconscious mind, and give them a chance.
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. The results often amaze him: sometimes by their excellence, sometimes by their stubborn in-consequence.
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 he has deliberately decided upon.
All you can do here is to cultivate your powers of observation and feeling, and discover what ideas will never fail to open the door to them - and let them out.
(From the works of Walter S. Campbell)