Take a Creative Writing Tip from Stephen King
How to use your unconscious mind to expand your writing ideas.
When focusing on a writing challenge and unable to find a creative solution, I turn the problem over to my unconscious mind. It’s using what Stephen King calls ‘the boys in the basement.’
In his book, On Writing, Stephen King uses “the boys in the basement” to describe that unconscious mind that is always working away under the surface. Holding all our knowledge in the conscious brain, without storing some in the unconscious, we’d soon be losing our marbles. Therefore, learning to use the two parts of my brain in tandem sounded like an excellent plan to me.
The information in the conscious brain works like tabs in a filing cabinet. Pull the tab and we open a trap door into the unconscious minds. One explanation I heard says that the brain storage area is actually millions of little filing cubicles. Everything we’ve ever been exposed to is in there somewhere.
But it may not be in any order, or even in its entirety in any one cube. And since the unconscious has no filter, the validity of the information is in question. The true and the false are all stored as fact. And it is retrieved without judgment and therefore may not be currently applicable.
