characteristic complaint of writers that the characters take over and that is because
you’re writing not out of the demands of your consciousness but very much from
the demands of that invisible part of the brain where all the intuitive wisdom is. So
that you can use the front of the brain to edit, that’s why editing is far less
dangerous and in many ways far easier. The tough part, the hidden part of the
brain doesn’t have to be brought into play much but, you know, this unconscious
mind has an agenda too, and it’s a kind of inescapable agenda. I ’m sure that it’s
the sort of an agenda which is set for us in some of our dreams when our innermost
disappointments, recurrent anxieties, significant anxieties and other issues are
presented to us. Where angers we don’t even know we have, most significantly,
are revealed to us. Where residual furies and residual fears, which we thought had
been beaten, are revealed. So that part of the brain sets its own agenda for us and
that’s why the characters seem to have a drift of their own, an authority of their
own. They’re all manifestations of us but they’re more than manifestations of us
because they come from that, as you say, collective pool of myth and archetypes
and all the rest of it. I was talking about this in Canada just before I came home
last weekend at Harbour front and I said, for some reason, all the drowned maidens
and all the drowned sailors emerge from the sea. But they’re not bloated bodies,
they’re people with an agenda, they rise to the surface. Writing a novel, painting
a picture, whatever, is like a depth charge into that area of the brain, a benign
depth-charge in that it releases all the people we didn’t even know we knew. The
process ... another common aphorism of mine when I ’m talking about this thing is
that I say you write novels with the part of your brain ... there’s something about
the process of novel writing that you have to set down and start in a rational sort of
way and you proceed in a rational, not irrational, a rational sort of way but on the
other hand the process brings into play this side of your brain, this side of the brain
that lets you find out that you know things that you didn’t know you knew. And
that you are capable of images and insights that you didn’t know you possessed.
And it’s because the novel does release that, does reach down into that benign
sediment, into the bottom of the sea. I definitely think of it as a sea, talking about
the drowned maidens and sailors emerging. I t would perhaps be more accurate or
equally accurate to talk about it as a cemented over parking lot under which all
those heroes and heroines are buried. And there’s nothing like a male Australian
childhood of my generation to produce such a store of buried maidens and sailors.
But the fact that I spoke of sailors makes me realize that I thought of it as a huge ...
ron
(Ron)
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