The creative process defies all logic. Where does the impulse come from, and why should the need to write grip the writer so inexplicably?
Writers of fiction own a strange something that wills and works for itself. It can feel like another being within the individual that often does not listen to the structured visions created in the head of a novelist, and drawn up in tight plans for a future book. This wilful spirit answers to many names, inner vision, creativity, the subconscious, or imagination. Whatever its name it is bold and free, obeying only itself. This liberty of the imagination is a writer’s most precious possession. Through it a book, once it is underway, will usually take on a life of it’s own, and reject the neat plans devised for it. It will demand the writer take risks, pushing out in all kinds of ways, putting in situations and complications never earlier thought of. Sometimes this now living, breathing book will produced characters never earlier envisaged. They will be found at your desk one morning as you sit down, demanding a role in your work, and you cannot refuse them.
Charlotte Bronte, in a preface to her sister Emily’s, Wuthering Heights, speaks of this very thing when she says, “Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption.”
Strange things happen in the world of the imagination. While immersed in the writing of a novel, the real world will often feel like fantasy, and the fantasy lived the reality. Time can come to have little meaning, one moment you raise your head from your work and it is Autumn, the next time you raise it, is Spring and Winter has been bewilderingly lost. And although it may sound odd, unless all these strange things can happen, a book is in danger of not carrying conviction. It will run the risk of not being a complete world in which readers can loose themselves, laugh, cry, share and identify with all the human emotions with which that world is filled. The reader will not be able to enter the soul of the writer, nor the writer cross into the reader’s soul. This human sharing between writer and reader is the essence of all literature; the greater the writer, the greater the ability to stir the souls of others.
Yet, what is this ability, that wills and works for itself? Carl Jung, a father of modern psychology, was intrigued by the creative impulse in man and its strange workings that he examined in The Spirit in Art, Man and Literature. Jung stood before the creative process in a state of awe close to bewilderment. ‘There are works, ‘Jung says in the manner of a man observing a strange insect under a magnifying glass, ‘that …positively force themselves upon the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The work brings with it a form of its own; anything he wants to add is rejected, and what he would himself reject is thrust back at him…he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that this is his own will speaking, his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things he could never have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads…as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will.’
‘What interest me most,’ said Virginia Wolfe, looking back over the final pages of The Waves, ‘is the freedom and the boldness with which my imagination picked up, used and tossed aside all the images and symbols which I had prepared.’
‘Whenever I am writing I am physically ill,’ wrote Dostoevsky in a letter to a friend. Indeed, during the writing of Crime and Punishment so great was the fever of writing that he suffered a nervous breakdown. Flaubert describes the writer at work as a monstrosity, something outside nature, locked into an anguish that lasts over weeks, months or years, as long as a book is incomplete. Tolstoy felt he left a piece of flesh in the inkpot every time he dipped his pen into it. Joseph Conrad has described taking twenty months, neglecting everything in his life to wrestle with Nostromo. So many of the biographies of great writers make it clear that the creative process is like some giant parasitic creature that battens onto their humanity and yokes every thing to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and normal human happiness. And yet the anguish of the process is made bearable for most writers by those moments of inner vision that Flaubert describes as the purest joy, ‘something enters into you,’ he writes.
Faulkner said a novelist is a person driven by demons. He didn’t know why they chose him, and he was usually too busy to wonder why. ‘A writer has a dream,’ said Faulkner, ‘And he has no peace until he gets rid of it. Until then everything goes by the board to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother to get a book written he will not hesitate.’ Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn, said Faulkner, was worth any number of old ladies.
Harsh as it sounds, Faulkner is right – in one abstract way or another, we have all ‘robbed our mothers’ to get our books written, we are all writing a dream, seeking the brief ecstatic peace at the end of the road, before we turn to begin the next dream.