Now that we’ve explored novel structure, its constituents and connection to the external world through research, we’ll explore its relationship to the author’s internal world. The author creates the novel within his internal landscape, and to study this we must delve deeply into psychology. This is the creative process in detail, its psychology and mysticism. Since storytelling is in its essence myth, we will rely heavily on Jungian psychology.

One might view the creation of the novel as coming solely from two places: the external world and the author’s internal world, neither of which should be neglected when studying craft. The dual flow of information into the novel can be graphically depicted in the following diagram:

We have a tendency to envision the external, physical world as “real” and the internal as imaginary, “unreal” and to neglect the imaginary in favor of the real. But to get a good grasp of his creative process, the author must develop the tools to deal with his internal processes, which in large part generally go unnoticed. Initially we will take a look at the external world and to a certain extent “discredit” it. It is not as “real” as you might think. Following this I will try to enhance the credibility of the other world, the internal, to provide a more balanced picture of the human landscape. I want to dispel our belief in the literal, "concrete" world and elevate our estimation of the non-literal one.

THE NATURE OF REALITY

In the opening chapter, I talked about novel writing being a process of both method and madness. So far we’ve only dealt with method. Also in that first chapter I talked about how storytelling comes down to us as an art thousands of years old, ancient myth-making. The writing of stories on paper goes back to Homer for Western Civilization, 750 BC, but the oldest surviving story ever written is the Epic of Gilgamesh which was recorded on clay tablets around 2700 BC. The story was undoubtedly much older than the tablets discovered by archaeologists because it was the result of an oral tradition where stories were passed down from generation to generation. Apparently storytelling is just a part of the human endeavor. To fully understand the nature of storytelling we’ll have to understand a little more about our own psychology and how we put together reality.

What we call the real world is a figment of our imagination. Nothing on earth or in the heavens is solid. Matter itself is composed of atoms, which are 99+% vacuum. Matter also has both particle and wave manifestations, and thus is ephemeral in its very nature. Quantum theory tells us that even the way matter is put together is uncertain, particles having only a statistically-probable presence. And psychologists tell us that the Universe really only exists as we know it in our own minds. We "create" the Universe with information received from our five senses. Even our most powerful sense, sight, gives us a false representation of the world. We believe we see an object, but in fact we only see light reflected from it. Our brains are accustomed to decoding the characteristics of light, and from it we create our vision of the world. The senses of touch and hearing also play a powerful role in our formulation of the world, smell and taste more minor ones. A close-knit relationship exists between what is "out there" and what "resides within" because the one holds the key to our understanding of the other. The key to decoding the Universe is within ourselves. 

But this is only the first level of "false" reality. Tables, chairs, roads, cars, our entire culture, is a construct of the human mind. They are objects in the "real" world but only serve our perception of what they are. They are a result of culture. An alien race of beings would have no idea of their use anymore than if they were rocks on a beach. So the fact that an object is a chair resides within us and not within the chair, yet we think of the lump of wood as a chair without question. Culture comes from within the human psyche and is projected on the external world.

Books and writing are a further level of human creation. The words on a page only make sense to someone versed in their learning and practiced in their interpretation. In a very real sense, they only reorder what is already inside us. They have no content other than to those who can read meaning into them. Even news stories taken from our own lives are mental constructs, human invention. They are not even summaries but constructions pieced together from parts of a much richer experience. We learn to use story as the coinage of communication. Our lives contain no stories. Biography and history are the invention of the mind. History didn’t exist until the 5^th century BC when Herodotus wrote about the Persian invasion. All these constructs result from the nature of human consciousness. We tend to live our lives and interpret them in terms of story. We single out the facts that fit into story based on what we interpret as significant. I don’t say this to trivialize it. I only want to call to your attention to how we construct "reality."

Where does that leave us relative to the novel? We can see that our minds are no stranger to the "creation" process. When a reader picks up a novel, he already posses all the skills necessary to create the world because he is currently and always has been creating the real world with data from the five senses. But while reading a novel, the stimulus doesn’t come from the outside world. The reader’s imagination is stimulated by the author’s words. I've said it before but it's so important I'll say it here again. When a reader picks up a novel, he enters a world in which he suffers total sensory deprivation. We know from deprivation experiments that without outside stimulus, the mind has a tendency to hallucinate (see John C. Lilly’s The Center of the Cyclone), and since some part of the reader must reside within the fictional world, a world of total sensory deprivation, the potential for hallucination exists.

We’ve all experienced this "creative" act before. When we look at a pattern in the grain of a rock, our minds tend to create an image, e.g., a man on horseback, or a ship at sea. This is projection. We project some image contained within us onto an external object. But it is also a creative act, perhaps the creative act.

Psychologists use this ability with the irregular, random shape of an inkblot to determine a patient’s mental state. This is a natural tendency of the human mind. We’re at it all the time, creating reality. Using this same technique, the mind can invent a complete story from only a few facts. Just as the mind "imagines" the external world using the stimulus of the senses, the reader, by starting with only the seed of an idea created by words on the page, dips into his own imagination and invents, creates, the world present in the novel. Every reader will have a unique version of what they read, create a unique world. That's the reason some will like a certain novel and others detest it. It creates terrific problems critiquing a work. But we'll get into critiquing in the next chapter.

A novel is then little more than a "blueprint" for constructing a particular fictional world. (That's the reason good readers are as important as good writers. They have to know how to decode the words on the page and create the fictional dream within themselves.) But the novelist who writes the words goes a step deeper into the imagination than does a reader. The author doesn’t even have the stimulus of the words. The author must suck the story from his own imagination. It’s not an easy process. Writers suffer from distractions, writer’s block, and generally just grumble a lot.

Why is writing so difficult? What is the process? And why do some writers say that while writing, they exist in a state of total terror? We might rephrase these questions: What is the nature of our imagination? From where do we retrieve the information we put into a novel? What is the source of creativity? What is the material of the imagination?

The answers lie in the relationship between psychology and art. To understand this relationship, we’ll turn to Carl Jung. From him we’ll learn that this invented, fictional world is not so much a lie as it might first appear.

JUNG’S VIEW THE SOUL

Carl Jung was the father of what is known as analytical psychology, so called because its principles are derived from experimentation. Jung was a Swiss-born psychologist and psychiatrist, and a student and collaborator of Sigmund Freud for several years until they had a falling-out, after which Jung founded his own school in Zurich. Jung placed emphasis on "the will to live" whereas Freud placed it on "the sex drive."

THE EGO

Jung’s map of the psyche (also referred to as the soul) begins with ego-consciousness, which forms the center of the field of awareness, sort of the center of the center. The ego, one’s "I-ness," originates one's willing, desiring, reflecting, acting, and is the mirror in which the psyche sees itself. It is the most central focal point within consciousness and feels as if it has existed forever. The ego functions like the image in a mirror for the psyche, while providing decision-making and freewill functions. Yet it is morally neutral.

The ego is not the entire consciousness. The ego is simply an agent of the psyche, a focus of consciousness and the center of awareness. Just as the earth revolves around the sun, the ego revolves around a greater psychic entity, the self.

THE PERSONA

The core of the ego doesn’t change over the life of the individual, but during childhood, culture creates a layer around its center called the “persona”. The persona constitutes that portion of the ego acceptable to the outside world. As Jung explained it: 

The persona is a complicated system of relations between the individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.

This seems like a really good situation. As the child grows, his persona develops, and he learns how to deal with his culture and becomes a nice person. But the development of the persona has consequences because the ego, self-centered as it is, has other qualities that aren’t so socially, culturally, acceptable. These negative qualities aren’t just eliminated and have to go somewhere.

THE SHADOW

Simultaneously with the formation of the persona, part of the ego is rejected, suppressed and no longer forms a part of ego-consciousness. This rejected portion of the ego becomes the shadow, which is immoral or at least disreputable within the culture. Thus this “bad-guy” forms somewhat of an opposite to the “good-guy” persona. Rather ominously, as a part of the ego, the shadow retains elements of freewill and decision-making. Even more disturbing, most of us remain unaware of the shadow, which means that it is not fully under control. As you might imagine, the relationship between the persona and the shadow is the source of much internal conflict.

The shadow does not constitute the entirety of the unconscious. The unconscious is the unknown psychic and includes the vast bulk of the psychic world.

THE UNCONSCIOUS

During a child’s development, ego-consciousness is subjected to disturbances from the external world. These "collisions" between the ego and the world can be positive in that they stimulate ego development in the directions of stronger problem solving and autonomy. But also other collisions occur, those between the ego and "objects" occupying the vast unconscious psychic space. Jung termed these unconscious objects, complexes. The complexes are psychic entities outside consciousness that cause ego disturbances from within. They constitute the contents of the unconscious. These complexes are the gremlins and inner demons that catch us by surprise. Shown diagrammatically:

One might well imagine this hidden internal landscape to be metaphorically the Labyrinth of Greek myth. If we choose to encounter this part of ourselves we must descend, as did Theseus, paying out Ariadne's tread to help us find our way back. At the end of the Labyrinth we'll find the Minotaur, the half-man, half-animal part of ourselves we recognize as “the other”.

The core of each complex is dual, consisting of an image, or psychic trace produced by trauma, and an innate archetypal component closely related to it. Trauma is the creating force behind complexes. Prior to trauma the archetypal piece exists as an image and a motivating force but does not have the anxiety-producing quality of the complex. But trauma provides the emotionally-charged memory that becomes associated with the archetypal image, the two welding in the processes. The complex then becomes enriched by similar experiences. Complexes are so emotionally laden that they can erupt spontaneously into consciousness and take possession of the ego. We are rarely aware this is happening. The ego is deceived into believing it is acting autonomously.

The part of the complex caused by trauma is personal and composed of forgotten and repressed personal experience. This forms what Jung called the personal unconscious. The other part of the complex contains an innate, primitive archetypal component and is termed the collective unconscious. Each complex is an image, and image defines the essence of the psyche. Dreams are made of unconscious images and behave as a stranger in the sphere of consciousness. When activated, a complex makes us feel as though we’re in the grip of an alien entity. As might be expected, the archetypal images of Mother and Father are the giants of the unconscious. Archetypal components are inherited and not acquired. They belong to us by virtue of being human and are not derived from culture. Culture is derived from them.

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

The deepest layer of the psyche is the collective unconscious. It is a combination of universally prevalent patterns and forces, "archetypes" and "instincts," that constitute nature’s gift to each of us. Jung put it this way:

Man "possesses" many things which he has never acquired but has inherited from his ancestors. … he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a specifically human way, and these he owes to millions of years of human development. Just as the migratory and nest-building instincts of birds were never learnt or acquired individually, man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature, and not only of his individual nature but of his collective nature. These inherited systems correspond to the human situations that have existed since primeval times: youth and old age, birth and death, sons and daughters, father and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious. For them they are only the habitual functioning of instinct that were preformed long ago.

For a writer, the most important part of the collective unconscious is the inherited archetypal images. They attract the psychic energy and are the origin of culture.

… the archetype appears in the form of a spirit in dreams or fantasy products, or even comports itself like a ghost. There is a mystical aura about its numinosity, and it has a corresponding effect upon the emotions. It mobilizes philosophical and religious convictions in the very people who deemed themselves miles above any such fit of weakness. Often it drives with unexampled passion and remorseless logic towards its goal and draws the subject under its spell, from which despite the most desperate resistance he is unable, and finally no longer even willing, to break free, because the experience brings with it a depth of fullness of meaning that was unthinkable before.

Archetypal images are beyond direct human grasp and form a realm of the soul. Standing before this realm, the collective unconscious, is a "presence" called the "anima" in men and the "animus" in women. The anima/us provides access to the archetypal images.

THE PERSONA AND ANIMA/US BRIDGES

Just as the persona, the public personality, provides a protective bridge between the ego and the outside world, the anima/us bridges the ego and the collective unconscious.

The persona faces outward into the social world and assists with necessary external adaptations. Similarly the anima/us faces inward toward the inner world and helps adapt to thoughts, feelings, images, and emotions confronting the ego. In men, the anima tends to be a feminine presence and hypersensitive, drip with sentimental. In women, the animus tends to have the emotional energy of an opinionated bully. Men in the grip of their anima tend to withdraw into hurt feelings, and women in the grip of the animus tend to attack.

Though at first this might seem a contradiction, that men essentially have a feminine personality standing at the gate to the collective unconscious and women a masculine one, it results from the process of conception. When a boy is conceived, the masculine elements are liberated and feminine elements shutdown to become the hidden anima. For a girl, the feminine elements are liberated and masculine elements shutdown to become the hidden animus. But the influence of the anima/us is so profound, particularly when it’s not integrated with the ego, that it can dominate the personality. As long as the anima/us is unconscious s/he is always a projected perception of the outside world because everything unconscious is projected. The anima/us is the ever-receding mirage of the eternal beloved. A man then chooses as his love the woman who best fits his own unconscious femininity, she who can receive the projection of the feminine presence standing before his collective unconscious. Similarly for a woman. Also parents, children, birth and death are already virtual images in the unconscious.

Murry Stein, in his book Jung’s Map of the Soul, describes the ideally developed person:

The conscious and unconscious parts of the psychic system work together in a balanced and harmonious interplay, and this takes place in part between the anima/us and the persona. Here the ego is not flooded by material from without or within but is rather facilitated and protected by these structures. … The persona is able to adapt to the demands of life and to manage stable relations with the surrounding social and natural worlds. Internally there is well managed and steady access to a wellspring of energy and creative inspiration. Outer and inner adaptations are adequate to the demands of life.

The reason most of us rarely experience life like this is that we pay no attention to our inner development. We don’t teach how to do this in our schools and even ostracize those who seek help when overcome by internal turmoil. Most of us are primitive internally. We act as if we have no need to understand ourselves and blame our problems on the external world when most of them have internal causes. Too bad we don’t get a User’s Manuel for the Psyche when we’re born.

The image of the anima/us brings excitement and stimulates desire for union, engenders attraction and a sense of adventure. Anima/us provides a strong emotional command that creates a perception of reality. Therefore, the anima/us is transformative.

If we continue the analogy to Theseus' descent into the Labyrinth, we might see the anima as Ariadne standing before the gate with her thread to help us find our way out.

Interaction between the ego and the anima/us is essentially one of conflict and confrontation. The ego engages the anima/us in a process of head-to-head confrontation during which differences become differentiated and articulated. The anima/us provides a guiding influence through archetypal images that takes us beyond ourselves. Eventually clarity is achieved and therefore the process, deeply steeped in conflict, becomes one of consciousness raising. The process has allowed oneself to experience the profound heights and depths of one’s own mental universe and return transformed.

TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH CONFLICT

Perhaps we can now understand why fiction is so heavily dependent on conflict. The characters in a novel are engaged in the same conflict/resolution process in which the ego and the anima/us are engaged. And we can understand why we require that a novel have meaning. We expect a work of fiction to do more than just help us escape our worldly dilemmas. We expect it to have importance and be meaningful. But a story is a process of discovery-through-conflict, and that process must result in transcendence for the central character. He must be changed by the experience, thereby allowing the reader to also be changed.

And now we can butter understand the nature of Premise and the reason it is the DNA of the novel. A novel is a reflection of the life process, the conflict/resolution process in which the ego and anima/us engage. Creating a novel brings that process into the imagination where it can experienced. This is the work of consciousness raising and the reason Premise has a cosmic quality that adds spiritual depth to the work. The reason fiction exists at all is the mechanism that gives expression to the conflict between the ego and the anima/us and allows it into consciousness. All stories have meaning and are morally directed, either consciously or unconsciously, because the ego/animus conflict is morally based.

Not only is this the reason Premise works, but it also explains the reason why the Premise so difficult to grasp in our own work and see in others. It constitutes the novel’s unconscious, the unseen structure underlying its basic motivation.

The fact that every author has an anima/us is the reason women can write good male characters and men can write good female characters. The image of the opposite sex is already buried within us. And the reason we can develop such a variety of characters is that the anima/us is so complex. A comment by Jung illustrates the diversity of a man's anima:

... the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore. Besides this ambivalence, the anima also has "occult" connections with "mysteries," with the world of darkness in general, and for that reason she often has a religious tinge. ... as a rule she is more or less immortal, because [she resides] outside time.

[from The Psychological Aspects of Kore, 356]

A woman's animus is at least as complex.

ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY

Archetypal psychology, an outgrowth of Jungian theory, is deliberately affiliated with the arts and culture. As archetypal psychologist view it, the archetype, as a part of the collective unconscious, is accessible to the imagination and presents itself as an image. The image is not viewed as a mental construct but as the basic unit of the psyche and therefore irreducible. Archetypes are the fundamental patterns of existence. These archetypal images come and go of their own will and are transcendent to the world of sense. Archetypes are viewed as the primary forms that govern the psyche, and thus archetypal psychology is linked with culture and the imagination, rather than the medical and empirical psychologies. The primary and irreducible language of these archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myth.

This is of crucial importance to the writer because to glimpse imaginal realities requires methods and perceptual faculties different from that used to see the sensual world. For the writer to be in contact with his own imagination, he must develop different skills. The writer must become sensitive to the imaginal realities emanating from the collective unconscious.

With this knowledge then, mythology takes on a much heavier significance. These stories, which have come down to us through the millennia, have drifted in content, merged and separated again and again from reality until they became "composites". They tells us something profound about human existence. As Thornton Wilder put it:

…myth-making is one of the means whereby the generalized truths of human knowledge finds expression and particularly the disavowed impulses of the mind escape the ‘censor’ of acquired social control and find their way into indirect confession. Myths constitute the dreaming subconscious soul of the race telling its story.

We can seen then that the process of novel writing is not one of so much fabricating a false reality as it is one of discovering a mythology, one that may be highly personal.

We don’t have a set of instructions which tell us how to develop inspirational skills. However, we can note that dreams and states near sleep seem to put us particularly close to the source of inspiration. Thus we come to the state of liminality.

LIMINALITY

Without a set of instructions for dealing with inspiration, it might be thought that the best we can do is put ourselves in a position to experience it. But we can go a little further through a concept called "liminality”. The word "liminal" means "threshold," "entrance". Liminality is the threshold of conscious awareness, the twilight zone between wake and sleep, the conscious and the unconscious. While in this state, our identity is held in suspension. We are no longer fixed in our perception of others or ourselves. The question then becomes how to access information beyond this threshold, how to entice it across.

Jungian psychologists have studied liminality and how to move within this often terrifying terrain. Jungian psychology views the gods of the ancient Greece as archetypes within our psychological makeup. They constitute the archetypes on which our culture is based. For example, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was said to be a son of Asklepios, the god of healing. Physicians of today all owe their craft to his archetypal influence. In ancient Greece he had many healing centers, some concentrating on medicine and surgical practices, but others devoted to what could only be termed psychotherapy centers where the priests Asklepios cured patients by reading their dreams.

The Greek god Hermes is he who transgresses boundaries. He negotiates the boundary between the consciousness and the unconscious and is the light-hearted bringer of sleep and dreams. As guide of souls in the Underworld (a place where all souls of the dead go and not to be confused with hell), Hermes also stands at the boundary between life and death, where life meets death and the two fuse as warp and woof of an eternal fabric. His mother was associated with Heaven and Night. Everything around him becomes ghostly. Hermes is, in the ancient Greek o aggeloV, the angel, messenger of the gods. He is also the protector of travelers. And in the sense that a novel is a journey into another world, Hermes is ever with the writer.

The creative act itself is a process of pulling material from both the personal and collective unconscious and depositing it in the author’s consciousness. The fictional world has mythological characteristics and is close to the dream state ruled by Hermes. Hermes sits at this interface, dips his bucket into the cauldron of the unconscious and dumps it into our imagination.

The characteristics of this mental state are that the author’s inner ground shifts. His base is no longer on firm ground and can be easily influenced, pushed and blown about by the winds of the unconscious. The author’s sense of identity is suspended, and he becomes more susceptible to putting on another’s persona or able to speak with another’s voice. While in liminality, the author is much more emotionally sensitive and open to input from both the personal and collective unconscious. He is up against the inner space inhabited by the "others," the anima/us.

THE WRITER AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

The processes of creating a novel can be segregated into two categories. The first is composed of those that spring from the author’s intention, in that the author is in control of the material; and the second is composed of those that force themselves upon the author. While the author writes, he has little control over the material as it springs forth from the imagination. All novels exist as works that come from both processes, no novel being solely the result of purely intention or inspiration. Jung says of the inspired work in his essay, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, that

… the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will.

This is the part of a novel that springs from the collective unconscious and is archetypal in nature. Jung describes the archetype as it occurs in literature:

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure—be it a daemon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. When we examine these images more closely, we find that they give form to countless typical experiences of our ancestors. ... In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history, and on the average follow ever the same course. It is like a deeply graven river-bed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing along as before a broad but shallow stream, suddenly swell into a mighty river. ...

The moment when this mythological situation reappears is always characterized by a peculiar emotional intensity; it is as though chords in us were struck that had never resounded before, or as though forces whose existence we never suspected were unloosed. … At such moments we are no longer individuals, but the race; the voice of all mankind resounds in us.

The influence of the archetype would then seem to be responsible for the unfathomable reception of books like Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Waller’s Bridges of Madison County. In these works craft isn’t so much the key to success as the subject matter. But what the author should keep in mind is that the most powerful part of the novel will undoubtedly come from within the deep recesses of his own psyche.

You should now be able to see why I wanted to lower your estimation of the information that flows into your novel from the outside world and bolster you opinion of what comes from inside you. Of the two worlds, the internal is even the more credible, for our culture flows from the non-literal into the literal world. The internal is the most "real" because our perception of the external comes from, and maybe is even created by, the internal.

APPLICATION: How do I apply this to writing a novel?

Okay then. This state of liminality is beginning to sound like the answer to the writer’s dream of not only explaining the creative process but also of finding a way into it and controlling it. This is true to a surprising extent, and some methods of accessing it appear in many books on creative writing. “Free association” is a technique of scribbling down random thoughts, and it is used by many writers to unhook the imagination from the intellect and let it free-wheel. Of course, psychiatrists have used this since Freud invented psychotherapy. A few of these techniques are discussed in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. They are good as far as they go, but I want to give you a couple of more direct methods of getting there.

The key of course is that liminality occurs close to the sleep state. So we have two events where we are actually in a state of liminality: just before we go to sleep and just after we wake. Therefore the best chance you have of being creative is break out the notebook after you get into bed and directly upon waking.

The first step is to scribble away until you get sleepy; however, you can carry this a step further. After you turn out the light, continue to concentrate on your story. If you have an inspiration, you can turn on the light, write it down, and turn off the light again. Don’t consciously quit thinking about your novel. I realize that you won’t get much out of this technique at first, but remember that developing this into a productive exercise is a process and keep at it. This is where some of your most creative work will happen. Just as you’re entering the sleep state, that state of liminality, if you can still focus on your novel, ideas will really start to blossom. I’ve spent as much as two hours turning the light on and off trying to get the inspiration down on paper and trying again to get to sleep. If you have a sleeping partner, this will probably drive them crazy, so it isn’t for everyone.

The less trouble-prone technique is writing directly upon waking. The trick here is to remember that the first thought to allow into your mind must concern your novel. The human mind is a lot like a computer. The first thing you do in the morning with a computer is boot it. This loads the operating system into memory and allows it to function. During the waking process we similarly activate the information we need to function during the day into our brains. If, instead of showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and sorting out the days activities, you immediately start thinking about your novel and planning the activities of your characters, you should find that writing will be relatively easy and ideas should flow freely.

I have performed both of these activities for several years and found that thinking about my novel just before going to sleep primes me for even more creative work the next morning. At times when not bothered by outside distraction, I have worked continuously for as much as twenty-one hours. Once one of these marathon writing sessions is over, however, the following day or so can be rather uneventful on the writing front. I generally recover quickly.

The main point I want to make is this. Reaching and maintaining contact with Hermes world of liminality is an art and an athletic feat all unto itself. The writer must experience that world, realize how it exists in them, and learn how to gain access to it. Going and coming easily takes practice. The writer has to train himself just as does a long distance runner. If you stop for a while, you lose your conditioning, and even if you gain access, your progress will be slow again at first. You won't have the stamina. It is a special state, and to gain access to it consistently requires special skill.

A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

At the risk of being accused of going off the deep end, I'll relate the extremes to which I've gone to achieve the writing state. In December 1991, just before the Persian Gulf War, I decided to devote a month to a novel I'd been writing for the last few years. I had a rough draft, but the manuscript needed a concerted effort to make it into a full-fledged novel. I took the entire month off from my job and isolated myself at home. Since I was living alone at the time, this was relatively easy, and really not so unusual for a writer. But what I did next was a little unconventional.

I unplugged my TV and stereo, and covered all the clocks in my apartment. I vowed to leave my apartment only for food. I also vowed to think of nothing but the novel. When I went to bed at night, the last thing I thought about as sleep enveloped me was my novel. When I woke in the morning, the first thing I thought about, and the only thing I let myself think about, was my novel. I sat at my word processor from morning to night. I kept the curtains closed.

I allowed myself a single step outside in the morning to get the paper, since we were preparing for war in the Persian Gulf. Every morning I checked the headlines, then put it in the trash. No further word for the outside world was to creep into my isolation.

I used my insomnia as an asset. When I woke I wrote until I wanted to sleep. Then I slept. Daytime, night time, writing, sleep. It was all intertwined and unstructured.

I didn't know if this would work. Could I write continuously for a month? Was it humanly possible. Would I go insane?

Yes, it worked. Yes, I wrote for a month, 24/7, without interruption. My single excursion to the supermarket was surreal. I found myself overly happy and emotionally volatile. Back home it took no more than an hour to drop back into my writing mental state.

My one contact with the external world was with the telephone. I did receive calls, but I initiated none on my own. I kept conversations short. Every time the phone rang I about jumped out of my skin.

Not only was the experiment was a success, it seemed to warp me in the right way. Since then I've had no difficulty whatsoever with writer's block.

WRITERS BLOCK

Now that we understand something about the creative state, we are also in a position to understand what goes wrong with it. Writers block comes from losing contact with the liminal state of Hermes' world. Said another way, Hermes has taken a hike.

Writer’s block can be cured. Since the writing "trance" is so close to the sleep state, the author suffering from writer's block should start thinking about their novel immediately upon waking, and even before getting out of bed. This loads the material in much the same way a computer boots. In that fresh state the author's novel is put right up against the sleep state.

But the author can take an additional step in seeking a cure. Reviewing your work late at night just before sleep also places it close to the dream state and better prepares you for immediate retrieval in the morning. If this all starts to sound as if you have to devote your entire existence to your writing, you're starting to get the right idea.

If you are blessed with insomnia, this gives you more time to write and at precisely the right time. I define insomnia as unusual awareness within the sleep state. You are still in Hermes realm so use him. I find these periods to be enormously creative. Don't fight it, use it.

DEPRESSION

In dealing with the deep reaches of our nature, we take certain risks. Generally we encounter the unconscious during periods of crisis. Generally the psyche sleeps in its pale, complacent realm, but during crisis the psyche wakes, bringing with it all the elements of conflict and readies for the consciousness-raising, transcendent experience. That is the nature of the unconscious, and this is precisely the realm to which the author requests access. The result can be emotional instability. Frequently the author is said by those around her/him to take on the neuroses of her/his characters. Family members complain about her/his irritability, moodiness.

Even worse, all this focus on the inner self can cause you to step into an unusual state of existence. In short, our lives can come to parallel those of myth, and when that happens, it reeks havoc. We live out a Greek tragedy. As Murray Stein says in an essay in Facing the gods, edited by James Hillman:

Besides giving voice to the depth of experience and relating separate pieces of experience into a configuration, the connection of personal experience to myth can produce or consolidate a psychological inflation (assimilation of the ego by the unconscious, often archetypal, content). The individual is unconsciously living a myth rather than a life. More accurately, an unconscious content is living him, rather than he it.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, a non-writer, decided to become a mystery writer. After a few months of planning a novel, she abruptly quit. "My perception of people was changing," she said, "and not for the better." Everyone who writes should be aware of the dangers.

AUTHOR’S GLOW

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard puts the author’s feelings toward her own work in perspective:

Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

A little later in the same work she says again,

This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Authors fall in love with their work. A friend of mine, Karen Palmer who wrote the novels All Saints and Boarder Dogs, has termed this the "author’s glow." The author’s love for his own work can lead to a critical misjudging of it. Inspiration sweeps over us like an ocean wave, but all that get to the page is little bits of life’s debris in the sifted sand. We have to learn to express inspiration in words that trigger a similar emotional experience in the reader.

ETHICS

This may seem an unlikely place to discuss ethics, but according to Jung:

In itself, an archetype is neither good nor evil. It is morally neutral, like the gods of antiquity, and becomes good or evil only by contact with the conscious mind, or else a paradoxical mixture of both. Whether it will be conducive to good or evil is determined, knowingly or unknowingly, by the conscious attitude.

In this way the work of the artist meets the psychic needs of the society in which he lives, and therefore means more than his personal fate, whether he is aware of it or not. Being essentially the instrument of his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us.

Writing has long been thought to have a therapeutic value. I have found this to be true myself, but I also believe that the processes involved are some of the most powerful in the human experience, and, therefore, may also be destructive when used naively or cruelly. The power of the written word has its source in the forces that create the universe. I believe it has the power to transform human existence. It behooves us all, as writers, to be careful how we use it. Years ago I backed off from a horror novel I had started. Something just seemed wrong about it, though I do not believe all horror is bad and even believe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to be one of the most important works of modern times. However, Stephen King has regretting some of his own writings. We should all keep an evaluative eye on the spirit we serve.

When all is said and done, the author must evaluate his work for moral content and revise it accordingly, realizing that in its genesis, the work was amoral. Stephen King, after learning that a boy used one of his novels as a model to kill one of his fellow students and hold his class hostage, expressed regret that he’d ever written the novel. We, as conscious, moral human beings, must realize that every human act contains within it the connotation of ethics. An author is responsible for what he dumps into the world.

But this really goes back to the contract the author makes with the reader as a part of the Grand Illusion, as discussed in the chapter on narration. Remember that the reader has suspended disbelief. For the reader, this is a state of innocence and ethical vulnerability. The author has a moral responsibility toward his reader since the reader has voluntarily disarmed himself. Of course, the reader also has a responsibility to himself to question the ethical stance of any story, whether fiction or non-fiction.

In ancient times the Greeks believed that ingenuity came from an old religion, that of the Titans, and even more specifically as coming from rebellious Prometheus. The Zeus religion, which replaced the religion based ingenuity, was based on wisdom, a higher form of consciousness. Wisdom carries with it the connotation of ethics, whereas ingenuity does not. This is the old struggle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Science as a process of discovery that relies on ingenuity has no ethics; therefore, the application of scientific discoveries must be tempered with wisdom, which introduces ethics. In the creative state, the author suspends disbelief as he writes, a state resembling innocence. But at the end of the work, the author must assume an adult role, and use what wisdom he can muster to control the ethical content of the work. The author has already played his big cards by the selection of Premise and narrative stance. They are the tools the author uses to control ethical content. But ultimately Jung is correct. No one can tell what impact a work will have on the world, and the author must have a sort of faith that a higher order is involved.

ASSIGNMENT

The student is to continue developing chapter summaries, providing a one or two paragraph synopsis of each. Write the first two chapters as you would want it to appear in print.