November 30, 2005
Intuition Vs Consciousness
I have often thought about the roles of intuition and consciousness in the creation of literature. When I first began to write, the distinctions were irrelevant to me, not because they were both integrated, but because I thought there was only one way to write, intuitively.
The point of narrative discovery was simply that, discovery. The act of following an emotional impulse to its logical conclusion. Even if that conclusion was completely hidden at the moment the pen hit the paper.
As I got older I realized that not everyone wrote this way, that there were writers of fiction who crafted plots, who drafted scenarios, characters, stages, and scenes, and set them to play against each other like on the set of a movie. This level of conscious stage-craft was foreign to me and repulsed me even to a certain extent. The freshness of discovery, the tug and pull of the unknown was what carried my momentum as a writer. I thought: what a load of tedium it must be to drudge forth the heavy burden of the known.
I also thought it was impure, unethical, immoral even.
Now I have come to recognize that certain writers have been able to craft beautiful, useful, moral! texts with the full force of the undivided consciousness of their minds. To bring a story to light they mulled and staged and crafted. Joyce seems to have been just that sort of writer: one for whom the entirety of the scope of the book came into being as a concept he dutifully set forth to capture just as he saw it initially.
Of course, even for those who write ‘consciously’, moments of serendipity must surely exist. The momentum of a sentence, the implications of a word, the emotional interplay between a moment in the text and a moment in their subconscious certainly must have an effect, even if subtly, concerning where the story will go….
But even now, I have an amount of distrust for the writer — or the writing of the writer — who doesn’t allow the momentum of a story to allow the story to go where the story will go…. Who doesn’t unhinge themselves to the point that discovery brings forth something inside themselves they never expected….
As I get older, the possibility for this sort of intuitive approach seems lesser in me. I wonder how much that lessening stems from the emotional chaos that sort of an approach requires, from the fear that grows of the unknown? I wonder how much that fear is the cause of the conscious approach in any writer?
