“What we hope for is to proceed from the known to the known. We are not enthused about abandoning the known and engaging the unknown.”
These words from the late nondual writer Robert Wolfe about spiritual awakening (in Living Nonduality, Ojai: Karina Library, 2009, 325) apply equally to writers. Our default comfort zone is to feel as if we know what we’re doing when we start putting words on the page. We commonly assume that the order of progression for producing a completed work is something like this:
Have an idea.
Start writing.
Develop the idea in the direction that you imagined and expected when you began.
Write “THE END.”
Experience a fulfilling sense of creative accomplishment. And maybe receive some money.
As anyone who has gone at this writing thing for any appreciable length of time can tell you, that assumed approach reveals itself as pure fantasy at a frequency of somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred percent of the time. In fact, what it envisions is pretty much the obverse of how writing really works. We only maintain the fantasy because it provides a comforting illusion of knowledge and control.
The actual creative process is much more convoluted, obscure, and mysterious. For many or most of us, that means it is also much more uncomfortable. We are far less at ease with actively not knowing than we are with indulging the illusion of knowledge and control. We don’t like it when the thing we’re working on, the idea we’re attempting to manifest, takes on a life of its own and begins leading us along in a rush, or perhaps at a crawl, amidst an enveloping gloom that prevents us from seeing more than a few words ahead. We feel ill at ease when, instead of conceiving an idea and then working in a rational and organized manner to produce something from it, we realize that an idea has seized us and is now dragging us headlong into the darkness of the unforeseen.
But our discomfort does not really matter in the end, because whether we like it or not, that’s how it works. Moreover, that darkness of the unknown and unforeseen is where the real fulfillment lies, for it is there that your writing becomes a conduit for something bigger than you to announce itself through you. It is in the encounter with this darkness that you enter the mode of selfless creativity that, as A. D. Sertillanges put it in his classic book The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, “makes us interest ourselves in what is beyond us and yet has taken up its abode in our consciousness” (trans. Mary Ryan, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960, xv–xvi).
You may well find a miracle waiting on the other side of the darkness that you dread.
Dean Wesley Smith calls this approach “writing into the dark.” John Gardner called it following the fictive dream and averred that “this and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer’s process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find” (On Becoming a Novelist, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, 120). Gardner’s point holds true for writers of nonfiction as well. Each of the essays that appears in my book What the Daemon Said emerged out of my life in unexpected ways. So did the opportunity to collect them into a book, where their various interlinkages, as inhering in and emerging out of the “coherence of my self” that William Stafford wrote about, could become evident.
So, the question arises: If you are a writer, as you work on your current book, story, essay, poem, script, are you trying to force it to be something that fulfills a preconceived notion? Are you locking it and yourself into a comforting but ultimately futile and sterile illusion of rational knowledge and certainty? Or are you letting the thing reveal what it inherently wants to be? Are you allowing something beyond your conscious grasp and intentions to be infused in it? Are you letting it tell you where it wants to go and how it wants to get there—in short, what it really, deeply is?
H. P. Lovecraft famously said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” We encounter that fear—hell, we invite it—each time we pick up our pen or sit down at our keyboard.
In All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare said:
They say miracles are past; and we have our
philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar,
things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that
we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves
into seeming knowledge, when we should submit
ourselves to an unknown fear. (1.3. 891—896)
Don’t let the ancient fear of the unknown lead you to “make trifles of terrors” in your writing and thereby prevent potentially transcendent and transformative truths from speaking through your pen. If you will follow the fictive dream; if you will write into the dark; if you will take an interest in the thing from beyond that has taken up an abode in your consciousness; if you will submit yourself to that unknown fear—if you will do these things, you may well find a miracle waiting on the other side of the darkness that you dread.
Warm regards,
beautiful. mahalo for sharing... so much comfort felt in these words.
I think humankind has been many many things throughout many many years. Lovecraft could be mistaken in speaking for the hundreds of thousands of years we have occupied this fine planet. Perhaps this sense of fear as first is a more recent undertaking. Who knows? No one.