Greatest Writer's Tool

[Tegwedd ShadowDancer]

So what is the greatest writing tool a writer can have? It's more basic than your pen and paper, your typewriter, or the wordprocessing program on your personal computer. It is your subconscious, which is the wellspring from where all of your inspiration comes. It is a seething broth in a cauldron of images, concepts, ideas, and beliefs. Knowing this, midway into my 40s, I decided to make friends with my subconscious. A lot of people are afraid of their subconscious, fearing the sometimes frightening images that come through. But at 45, it no longer held any horrible images with which to scare me. I had already been through the worst that it could send me, and even the most horrific were merely grist for my writing mill. I decided to do what Stephen King had been doing for decades; I would write down those frightening images, those nightmares, and pass them on to others in the shape of stories. And writing them down was a kind of catharsis for me. As my therapist says, it's the best kind of therapy that I could do for myself.

The nice thing about the subconscious is that, like our DNA, or our fingerprints, each subconscious is different. I don't have the same kind of subconscious as my friend Kira, or even my Significant Other, Dallan. Each person has had different experiences, listened to different music, watched different images, and read different books. Even having read the same book, no two people apprehend the text in exactly the same way, which is why one religious group splitting off from another because of a minor point of dogma is so stupid. No two people apprehend the Divine in exactly the same way. Carried ad absurdum, pretty soon you have over 300 million churches in the USA alone; of one person each, which makes no sense at all. But enough about religion. Let's get back to writing.

The famous Viennese psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud did not like the term subconscious. He felt that it was scientifically inexact and vague. I respectfully disagree with him. For me, this subconscious is the container of those images, desires, ideas, and memories, of which we are only dimly aware. They come through for us in our manner of speaking, slips of the tongue, and in dreams. We also experience the subconscious when we daydream. In magickal terms, we refer to the part of the unconscious/subconscious that holds less socially unacceptable ideas, wishes, or desire is, as the Shadow. It is actively repressed by the conscious, or as Freud termed it, "the Ego," what we usually refer to one me use the one letter word "I". I personally divided the other 9/10ths of the iceberg of our minds, the part that is beneath the surface, into two portions; the subconscious and the unconscious.

The subconscious and unconscious, including Carl Jung's term; "the collective unconscious," is the source for our imagination which we cannot write or create anything without. Humankind is the only species on Earth that can think abstractly. That is, we are the only species that can think about something that is not directly in front of us; that we cannot see with our eyes, hear with our ears, touch with our fingertips, smell with our noses, or taste with our tongues. We can think about tomorrow. Tomorrow is not here yet; we cannot see it we cannot hear it smell it, touch or taste it; but we know it is coming, all the same. We can think about what problems or challenges are likely to pop up tomorrow, and take steps to defeat them. In a TV show that I saw some years ago, the host, Alec Baldwin, showed a sample of humankind's ability to think forward. It was very simple in construction; just a hollowed out ostrich egg shell with a hollow reed stuck into it, filled with water, and buried. But the concept was profound in light of the evolution of Homo sapiens. Whoever did this was thinking about the time he might pass the this way again, or others like him may pass this way again, and be thirsty, so he prepared a solution for this problem. We do this all the time. For example: if I have a doctor's appointment on a certain day, I prepare ahead of time I take out bus fare to get there, and back home again; I make sure that I have things to divert me while waiting for the bus, or the nurse to call my name once I am in the waiting room; and I make sure that I have money for lunch in the hospital cafeteria. That day is not here yet, but I have thought about what might happen on that day, thanks to my imagination, and past experiences.

Some of us, who have chosen to be artists, poets, or writers of fiction, especially science fiction, speculative fiction, or fantasy, can conceive of a world that does not exist, or send our minds toward a time that existed at one time, or lies far ahead in our future.. A psychoanalyst would be able to see portions of our subconscious when reading our work. He or she could analyze our personality by the images that we choose to describe in our story. I believe that our imagination comes to us through the subconscious and the unconscious, and these truly are the greatest writing tools that we possess.

[Minque Paw]

This is very interesting, and insightful. Thank you Tegwedd for posting this wonderful work.