I’m putting up an abbreviated post this week, as I will be helping facilitate a Jubilee School for the Debt Collective on Thursday evening when I normally would be writing. Fortunately, I have a lot of drafted and semi-drafted material banked up from playing the Feelings Collector last year to work with when there is less time.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—author of “Flow” and one of my early guides in this adventure—wrote a book about creativity, which I also read last year. “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” had a powerful effect in drawing me toward creativity as my chosen feeling for 2021, but I didn’t annotate it as extensively as “Flow” for a couple of reasons that seem somewhat unimportant now. At any rate, I will likely come back to this text, because there are some very useful chapters based on an extraordinarily rich set of interview data. Many of the conclusions in the book—and indeed the quotes below—are based on the collective insights provided into the creative process by the hundreds of individuals who were interviewed for this study.
For now, I just wanted to share and comment on a few quotes from Chapter 10 “The Domain of the Word,” which concerns creativity in the field of writing and letters. I don’t have page numbers for the quotes because I only have the book as an .epub, but bear with me.
Concerning the characteristics of “creative” writers:
“All of these writers were able to make their contribution only by first immersing themselves in the domain of literature. They read avidly, they took sides among writers, they memorized the work they liked—in short, they internalized as much as they could from what they considered the best work of previous writers. In this sense, they themselves became the forward-moving edge of cultural evolution.
On how writers make their mark:
“Sooner or later, each of them also became part of the field of literature. They befriended older writers, they gravitated to avant-garde schools and journals, they became intensely involved with other young writers. Eventually they became the gatekeepers by teaching literature and serving on juries, editorial boards, and so on.” As opposed to the generally ecstatic relation they had with dead writers, relations with live ones were much more problematic. Domin regrets the infighting of the literary “mafia”; Stern is aware of the potential for bitter jealousy among peers. Somehow or other, however, writers must come to terms with the social organization of their domain if their voices are to be heard.”
Regarding the mystery and labor of the writerly craft:
Another similarity among the writers was the oft-stressed emphasis on the dialectic between the irrational and the rational aspects of the craft, between passion and discipline. Whether we want to call it the Freudian unconscious where childhood repressions linger or the Jungian collective unconscious where the archetypes of the race dwell, or whether we think of it as a space below the threshold of awareness where previous impressions randomly combine until a striking new connection happens by chance, it is quite clear that all the writers place great stock in the sudden voice that arises in the middle of the night to enjoin: “You have to write this.” Everyone agrees that necessary as it is to listen to the unconscious, it is not sufficient. The real work begins when the emotion or idea that sprang from the uncharted regions of the psyche is held up to the light of reason, there to be named, classified, puzzled over, and related to other emotions and ideas. It is here that craft comes into play: The writer draws on a huge repertoire of words, expressions, and images used by previous writers, selects the ones most fitting to the present task, and knows how to make up new ones when needed. To do so it helps to have a broad base of knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of literature.”
Vis-à-vis practical matters:
“There were many similarities also in the methods these writers follow as they ply their craft. All of them keep notebooks handy for when the voice of the Muse calls, which tends to be early in the morning while the writer is still in bed, half asleep. Most of them have been keeping diaries for many years. They usually start a working day with a word, a phrase, or an image, rather than a concept or planned composition. The work evolves on its own rather than the author’s intentions, but is always monitored by the critical eye of the writer. What is so difficult about this process is that one must keep the mind focused on two contradictory goals: not to miss the message whispered by the unconscious and at the same time force it into a suitable form. The first requires openness, the second critical judgment. If these two processes are not kept in a constantly shifting balance, the flow of writing dries up. After a few hours the tremendous concentration required for this balancing act becomes so exhausting that the writer has to change gears and focus on something else, something mundane. But while it lasts, creative writing is the next best thing to having a world of one’s own in which what’s wrong with the “real” world can be set right.”