Idiosyncratic Writing : Can it Be Done Successfully?
Powerful, emotive writing, straight from our psyche using personal icons in the script
There is an inherent vanity in writing; believing you have something special to offer the world is built-in to the very act of putting your work out into the world — literary critic ¹
Idiosyncratic writers are ‘selfish’, they write exactly what they want to express.
Can it be done successfully while taking your reader along for the ride, willingly? If not, the risks are having one reader of your work — you.
Or your work being unintelligible, perfectly clear to the writer, but word salad —Definition: a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases — to everyone else.
What Is This Form and Style of Writing ?
Simply: it’s writing directly from our own psyche using personal images, obsessions, archetypes and icons.
What do you mean by psyche?
The psyche is the starting-point of all human experience, and all the knowledge we have gained eventually leads back to it. The psyche is the beginning and end of all cognition. It is not only the object of its science, but the subject also — Carl Jung ²
It’s much simpler than it appears we don’t have to read Jung to get the idea, though there may be something to be gained by understanding where this all comes from.
The psyche is the sum of who we are, everything that has gone into to making us as we are. The good stuff and the bad stuff.
What do you mean by personal icons?
Everyone I know has meaningful icons from books to rock bands or movie stars, towns or people they have met — or countless other images. They may be obscure to others but very meaningful to us.
This is the trick, the creative part: How to deliver personal, meaningful iconography to an audience, successfully.
Some clothe these images in poetry or fiction. Others use non-fiction.
Two famous Writers Who Took it to the Extreme
William S. Burroughs: wrote the experimental and socially shocking (in its day) Naked Lunch. Here is a partial list of his own obsessions, archetypes and icons that he used repeatedly and with little explanation, throughout his many books
- Reich and Orgone accumulators.
- Korzybski : General Semantics.
- Mayan calendar.
- Hassan i Sabah.
- Egyptian, Aztec, Mayan ciphers.
- The number 23.
- The secret, external controlling factors in life, which he named, the “Control Machine”.
- Spirit possession.
- Spells and curses.
It makes you wonder how he could have pulled such an oddball list into a cohesive work. Critics would say he did it with mixed results. Whereas Medium writers have the luxury of almost instant publishing and getting a level of feedback. Burroughs wrote whole books over long periods of time. Feedback was not his main interest. He was utterly obsessed with expressing his own inner workings.
James Joyce spent seventeen years writing — at first sight, the incomprehensible — Finnegans Wake, here is a brief quote to get a feel for this work:
of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his
As you may expect, the book was (and is) both lauded and ridiculed. The book is considered a classic in experimental writing and is used by fans as a brilliant cryptic text, to be solved with many levels of meaning — both of Joyce’s intention and the readers' invention.
Medium writers can use another overlay of iconography, by adding media to a story, either self-created or curated for its significance. It would have been interesting to see what Burroughs and Joyce had done with this added dimension. There is nothing to say we can’t display our inner expression via a serious work, though it would be done with a degree of finesse.
Writing from the Shadow Side:
Another of Jung’s theories was of our shadow side. Which is all that we are unaware of and keep suppressed (we don’t want to know about) often projecting such qualities unconsciously onto others. A healthy personality would allow much of this to float to the surface via writing (or any creative act).
First and foremost, a writer’s best friend is their Shadow. Get to know it, make friends, or at least allies, with it. However, refrain from falling in love with it. No one wants to read a writer’s personal self-indulgent Shadow rant. A writer’s job is to serve a story. A writer’s Shadow can and should inform the story, but not take over ³
My own take:
I really don’t believe it’s actually necessary to get too deep and involved about it all. It can be creative fun just to write using images that have personal meaning. To drag the (whole) Jungian thing with you, is a more therapeutic work. There may be some revelation and healing going on along the way. To write your way, with free impulse and passion; necessarily tempered with a little discipline is quite sufficient.
