On (not) understanding the subconscious
How I Finished My Book, Part 4 and Last
Long ago in this newsletter, I began, and failed, to explore my complicated relationship with outlining. Namely, the fact that I don’t do it. When writing anything from a news article to a book (as it turns out), I start at the beginning and write until I get to the end. The right beginning contains the seeds from which the rest of the piece flows, and until I find it, I can’t go anywhere else.
I learned from Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft newsletter that Zadie Smith has a similar process, which often (but not always) results in months or years of frustrating experiments with the beginning, and then mere days or weeks (even hours sometimes, for me) as the rest of the piece comes rushing out, almost fully formed. While agonizing over the beginning, “somehow the work of the rest of the novel gets done,” Smith said in a lecture. That work happens subconsciously, beyond notice or comprehension or control, but it does happen, and it feels like magic.
In journalism, I often feel like I’m surrounded by people who can perfectly articulate their researching and writing processes, predict exactly how long a draft will take, and consciously understand all the steps they go through to create something from nothing. In comparison, my process is uncontrollable, unpredictable, even unknowable. It’s almost entirely subconscious, and in the world of nonfiction, that can feel unprofessional and a little embarrassing. And yet, that unexplainable, subconscious magic is the foundation of all my best work, including my book.
Looking back now on the long periods I spent sick and struggling between book drafts, from the other side of vestibular therapy, I can see that my main creative problem was not that I was fatigued or dizzy or cognitively destroyed by looking at a computer screen, although I was all those things. It was that, when my vestibular system wasn’t working, my subconscious took over its job. Every single sub- and unconscious process in my body was 110% occupied with figuring out where I was in space. They were more or less succeeding at that job, but there was nothing left over for anything else, especially not writing, or even thinking.
When the physical therapy helped my vestibular system resume its job, it felt like my soul returned to my body. That, I think now, was my subconscious being freed to resume the work it is best at: Giving me ideas, an imagination, an inner life. Trying to write without a subconscious resulted in stilted, pedantic, flat prose that I hated. Getting my subconscious back made the book come alive, because I had a life force to give it. Even though—and this is truly surprising—the prose I had hated sometimes didn’t change that much. The surface of the book looked the same, but what was happening underneath was entirely different, in ways I still can’t quite explain. But now I’m ok with that inexplicability. Now I know I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Further Reading
As I was thinking about this essay, Counter Craft once again ran the perfect issue for me: an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy (starting with the terrifying Annihilation) and now Absolution, an unexpected return to Area X. Asked about the surprising speed with which he wrote the new novel, VanderMeer says, “It cracks me up to have to describe the process, because, especially when you’re leading a creative writing workshop, it is not very replicable. Novels usually start for me as dreams. That’s because I tend to feed my subconscious ideas consciously. I feed the things I want to write about and then they come out. Obviously, not in the ways I expect.” Read the whole thing!