On Writing: Why It's Not You Writing Your Novel
It's Something Else You Don't Understand PLUS Free Copies of My New Book
When I interviewed Howard Jacobson last week about the craft of writing, he claimed that any artist would tell you that when things are going well, you realise it isn’t ‘you’ producing the work at all. Howard believes that by immersing yourself in books - in ‘language’ - you would be able to dip into an almost mystical entitity called ‘Language’ to reveal your book to you. Likewise, Norman Mailer called his book on writing ‘The Spooky Art’. For him the ‘spook’ is not ‘Language’ but the unconscious mind.
Mailer writes this: ‘Let us dare to surmise that the unconscious is on close, even familial terms, with the most elusive presence in the conscious mind - our soul. Mailer talks about a writer’s forays into ‘the nature of such matters as being and nothingness, the near-to-unclassifiable presence of the unconscious and it’s demonic weapon - writer’s block.’
Mailer thinks that the writer has to form a proper relationship with the unconscious in order be productive. Access is necessary, and tricky, but you cannot push your relationship with your unconscious mind too far.
‘Suppose the relation of the unconscious to the conscious is analogous to that of a cultivated Greek slave in service to an overbearing Roman master. If we use this notion as a working premise we can assume out unconscious is full of the trickiest kind of resistance. All the writer receives is a sense of dull, edgy resentment’.
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