Creativity and the Subconscious Mind

A couple of people have asked me to say more about how I come up with those characters that stick in your head, and then become the sort that leap off the page once you write them into a novel. If you were one of them, I apologize for how long it's taken me to get this done; the truth is, I had to think on it for quite a while, because I don't really know the answer to the question.

The best I can come up with is this: I believe such characters come straight from my subconscious mind. From the part that gives us the content of our dreams. For example, as I used to say when talking on request in bookstores and libraries, the character Fremont Jones came to me first in a dream. It was one of those you dream right before waking. There she was, clear as a bell, that very same voice that comes through in the opening pages of the first book, STRANGE FILES. In my dream she said, "My name is Fremont, and I am a typewriter." I woke up immediately with that voice in my head, plus the interesting fact that she didn't say "I'm a secretary," or "I'm a typist," she said "I am a typewriter." It wasn't later until I found out that back in the time when she lived (that is, if she had really lived at all), the person who did the typing was indeed called by the same word as the machine, typewriter. I've never understood that, how I came up with that, and I still don't know. Which is why I think these things have to happen via the subconscious.

That doesn't mean they can only come in dreams. Other characters who are equally off-the-page-jumpers -- one that comes to mind is a restoration contractor named Paul Starbuck who appears in a little book I wrote for Harlequin Intrigue called LAIRD'S MOUNT, which I wrote with the pseudonym Madelyn Sanders -- can come to you in a waking state. Paul appeared in my head when I was doing some research for the book, before I'd started actually writing it. I was walking around in a very large house that had once been turned into a restaurant, then allowed to go into decline after its owners death. This building had been constructed as a sort of replica (meaning it was a far from perfect reproduction) of the Isabella Stewart Gardner House Museum in Boston, so I was already having some deja vu kind of things going on, which I think is another thing that gets triggered by the subconscious. And suddenly, I could see this man, almost as if he were walking right along by my side, and I knew he was a contractor specializing in that kind of restoration. I also knew his name was Paul, and that he had a dog that was a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf, that the dog was in fact named Wolf, and was waiting for Paul outside in his truck. This was such a vivid experience that when I got done with my walk-through (which I had been allowed by the realtor to do on my own, because I had explained to her why I wanted to see it and that I am able to do the kind of thinking I need to do for that purpose if I'm by myself) and went from the late-afternoon gloom of the no-electricity indoors to the outside light of day, I was surprised there was no truck with a very large dog waiting in the parking lot.

There have been other such experiences, with other characters, but I won't describe any more of them because I'm sure you get the picture.

How is this useful to anyone else who might already be writing a piece of fiction, or who might want to do it? I'm not sure, except that we all do have the subconscious mind working for us all the time. And there are ways we can each increase our acceses to its contents. The best way to do this is to make an organized effort -- such as keeping a notebook and pen by the bed -- to remember our dreams. Even if you think you don't dream, you certainly do because sleep researchers have found that if people are deprived of their ability to dream by being awakened every time REM sleep begins (rapid eye movements beneath closed lids signal a dream state), they will soon show symptoms of irritability and accident proneness at the least, and irrationality and even hallucinations at worst. A resolution to recall and to record dreams will help even someone who says he doesn't dream begin to remember them. That's one way.

Another way is to meditate. Although the purest form of meditation involves no thinking at all, there is a stage on the way to getting to the no-thoughts place in which the contents of the subconscious will begin to bubble up. If you practice meditation and pay attention to that, you will find access. It can quickly become habitual enough that such access is not hard to achieve, you just sort of put yourself into an abstracted frame of mind. There are plenty of people who go into that kind of frame of mind naturally, all the time. It's commonly called "daydreaming". Just don't do it when you're chopping onions or driving a car.

I like to take long walks in a quiet place. Or, lately now that I'm not so mobile, simply to sit in a quiet place. If I have a particular writing thing I'm working on and needing to make some progress, I'll hold that in my mind and soon some answers will begin to flow. It doesn't always happen, but usually it does.

I'm pretty sure any creative process works, or happens, because there has been some connection between the subconcious and conscious minds. Scientiests, neurologists and such who study the workings of the mind and brain and processes like sleeping and dreaming, tell us that we use less than half the capacity of the brain. Since they now can do scans that show what areas of the brain are involved in certain activities, such as reading or speaking or recognizing faces, this fact that much of the brain goes unused at present has now been documented. All the thoughts and observations we make but have no immediate use for get stored somewhere, and I personally think that's where the contents of the subconscious come from. The conscious mind can access them if an effort is made.

I also, being a child of the 60s (but I think I'd be this way even if I hadn't matured, at least sort of, in the 1960s), believe there is, as Carl Jung said, a Collective Unconscious. This would be the contents of combined knowledge and experiences over many cultures, coded into universal symbols and stored somehow in the DNA, and passed on. I think in Jung's time they didn't know so much about DNA so he may have not used that terminology, but that's the idea. The creative process taps into this kind of stored stuff, even if it's not overt. The most powerful themes and ideas in any kind of literature will carry echoes of these shared universal elements, even if they are not blatantly expressed.

In recent years, I've thought a lot about the nature of conciousness in general, and I expect in this book I'm working on now, FIREFLASH, because of the latent unusual ability idea, at least some of that will get in somehow.

That's the thing about writing -- nothing you've ever done will go to waste, which is OK, so long as you don't bore people to death with it. And if you can do it right, it might be a good thing. As I think I said, and surely intended when I began this blog, anyone who wants to write should go ahead and do it. Bring up those ideas whether they are in the conscious or the subconscious mind, because you never know who may enjoy sharing what you put on a page. Or how much it may benefit you just in the writing thereof, even if you decide to keep it to yourself.