Funnels, Soup & Dark Energy
Thoughts On How I Write
Writing feels like someone grafted this huge funnel to the top of my head. Down the funnel someone pours barrelfuls of information, patterns, data, structures, colours, senses, random stuff. All of this comes together in a thick, smooth, pea-green soup in the Postal Sorting Office of my brain.
My globulous Sorting Office, with the acumen evolution has bestowed upon it, sifts through the soup looking for some semblance of order — don’t ask me how, it’s a mystery to me. It breaks down and rearranges all the ingredients, then pushes all of them through the combined filter of my interests and obsessions and out pops a freshly baked loaf.
Sometimes writing feels like I’m channelling a cascading torrent of words and images. Other times — perhaps when the Postmaster is taking a nap — it feels almost impossible to produce a sentence I’m remotely happy with. For me, this hints at a subconscious foundation to the process of writing.
I often feel when my subconscious will allow me to write. The clouds part for me then, and I can see, smell and touch the sentences. They grow into paragraphs that stretch out their limbs to become chapters and then stand upright to walk on their own.
When I think about it, the role of the subconscious in my writing feels like the Dark Energy of the mind. We can’t see what it’s made of. It’s an unknown element, and yet it has to exist, or it wouldn’t interact with the choices involved in the act of writing. It wouldn’t bind the separate things I see to produce my character, who I am.
Shovel enough down the funnel, waggle it through the synapses, neurons and whatnots and something new comes into being. Something I have created and should be proud of no matter what — once I’ve edited it to within a nanometre of its life, of course. It’s my very own thought-baby: I hold it, nurture it, and then free it to live out in the cosmos.
I believe I write naturally; I write like a human being. Humans order, create and re-imagine stories from all the myriad inputs around us. Necessity got us down from the vanishing trees and onto the African savannah, but creativity and imagination enabled us to paint on cave walls, master fire, eventually build quaint little mud huts, and well, you know the rest.
I may be sneaking up on a conclusion! Deep breaths now…
How do I write? The way I was built to. Millennia of brain development, combined with my own life journey, enable me to order, understand, reorganise, translate and reinvigorate the world. The primordial soup of the subconscious is ignited by imagination. The initial spark cannot be summoned: it seems to happen when it needs to.
When you’re struggling to put a productive pen to paper why not give it a little time; let your funnel clear, your soup to stew and your Dark Energy bind it all together. What do you think?
Now if you asked me why I write, that would have been a totally different story…
Adam
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This was originally a guest post for StartYourNovel
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