In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes (p. 36): “[…] the organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind.”
We dream in archetypes and images. Our brain makes seemingly disjointed connections to process and create meaning of the day’s events, conscious or not. It takes courage to battle your own insecurities, fears, and doubts when they stare back at you on the page. Writers are courageous dreamers. We are asking ourselves to access something bigger than ourselves to create meaning. The stakes for potential failure (aka protecting our conscious ego) are life and emotional death. We can consciously harness this unconscious power through SoC writing exercises. The point here is production. The more we produce the more we connect with our subconscious and ultimately find authenticity in our voice. In the process of allowing ourselves to write like nobody else is reading it, we can grow and develop our writing, thereby gaining access to what it means to be us. SoC writing builds a bridge between prose (or poetry) and our true self.
Literary Examples
Éduard Dujardin (1861-1949) is known for first using interior monologue in his novel WE’LL TO THE WOODS NO MORE from which James Joyce (1882-1941) derived his SoC technique in ULYSSES. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway effortlessly interlaces omniscient narration with FiD. In the CAMBRIDGE COMPANION to VIRGINIA WOOLF[1], Sue Roe and Susan Sellars remind us that Woolf used her letters and diaries as a training ground for her art, the authors write (p. 111) that Woolf’s “diaries and letters offer more than a glimpse into Woolf’s view of writing or personal life. They contain many elements we look for in a work of art. There’s narrative, drama, even poetry in a significant number of the letters, and the diaries a far from being a prosaic recording of the day’s events.”
In one of those letters, Woolf writes about achieving self-knowledge (L5, p. 408; Roe/Sellars p. 119):
“I don’t think you can get your words to come till youre[2]almost unconscious; and unconsciousness only comes when you’ve [3] been beaten and broken and gone through every sort of grinding mill.” (L5, p. 408)
And in a diary entry (Roe/Sellars p. 122), Woolf writes:
“There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction.” (D1, p. 266)
In a more modern example, Devi S. Laskar’s poetic novel THE ATLAS OF REDS AND BLUES tells the story of a first-generation immigrant’s experience with racism. A mother of three is lying in her suburban driveway, bleeding from a gunshot wound. Her life flashes before her eyes in fragments travelling back and forth in time as she grapples with the question of identity in Trump’s America. Told in closed third person, Laskar effectively navigates the ongoing dialogue between the present and her memories. Daniel Kehlmann’s genre-bending novella YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT avails of the notebook structure as a doorway to SoC.
What fascinates me about the power of SoC writing is the why. Why does this work? Author, psychologist, and science journalist Daniel Goleman’s offers some insight. In VITAL LIES, SIMPLE TRUTHS, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-DECEPTION, Goleman examines how anxieties affect our subconscious and how denial and repression function within us. In essence, he tackles the consciousness of the unconscious and states that we cannot talk about the un-or subconscious without Sigmund Freud. Goleman asserts that (p. 58):
“[…] memory passes its information on to a subsequent chain of numerous such memory systems. These memories, said Freud, are unconscious. We are not aware of them until a later stage in the flow of information. Nevertheless, he contends, they can have effects on us while they remain out of our awareness: What we describe as our ‘character’ it’s based on the memory-traces of our impressions; and, moreover, the impressions which have had the greatest effects on us—those of our earliest youth—are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious. For a memory to rise into awareness in Freud’s model of the mind, it must pass from a memory system into the realm he labeled the ‘Unconscious.’ The unconscious has no direct access to awareness. Material from the unconscious passes next to the realm called the ‘Preconscious.’ The preconscious is the gateway to awareness, or ‘Consciousness’ in Freud’s model. If the mental energy invested in a thought in the preconscious become strong enough, then it will burst into consciousness and becomes the focus of attention. […]”
I argue that SoC writing is that mental energy deployed to bring the subconscious into awareness. Freud also asserted that forbidden thoughts leaked through the consciousness in disguised forms, namely dreams. Writers can harness this power in their prose. For example, in Alice Munro’s collection LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN, protagonist Del uses daydreams and imagination to bridge the gap between the known and unknown (p.31):
“So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny’s world like a troubling, distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same. In that world people could go drown in quicksand, be vanquished by ghosts or terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing was deserved, anything might happen […].”
When Del meets her uncle on her mother’s side, imagination and memory bleed into one another. Del’s mother’s memories of home are quite different than her uncle’s memories. Del realizes that memory isn’t necessarily a fact but more selective and that we have a choice in what to remember. Munroe’s work is a beautiful example of blending the craft and creative tool of interiority. Lee Kravetz uses a similar approach in his historical novel THE LAST CONFESSIONS OF SYLVIA P. The novel combines three first-person narratives across time. Each narrative avails of different structural elements (including epistolary form) to render the story and more importantly access the character’s memory of events, hereby gaining access to the character’s interiority.
[1] Cambridge University Press, 2000
[2] This is not a spelling mistake but exactly quoted.
[3] This is not a spelling mistake but exactly quoted.