Henry James said that "landscape is character," and this could well be what he meant. Our personalities, our emotions, are expressed in response to the sensual cues around us. We look at the landscape and what we see out there is our deepest emotional inner selves. This is at the heart of a work of art.
Why is this sensual center of our art so hard for us to get at? Miles Davis, if he were a writer, probably would struggle with the same problems I struggled with and that you're probably struggling with now. It's easy for him to say "you don't play what you know, you play what you hear," because his medium is entirely sensual, inescapably so. The sound that comes out of his horn is irreducibly sensual. Every other art form is irreducibly sensual. Dancers move, composers work with sound, painters with color; even abstract art isn't abstract at all—it's color and form. You stand in front of a Barnett Newman painting, and whatever may have been in his brain about artistic theory, what confronts you is a massive experience of color and a delicate experience of texture.
But you folks have it really difficult. No one in my position in any of the other arts has to say the things I say. Why? Because your medium is language, and language is not innately sensual. Language, in fact, is much more often used in non-sensual ways. Look at the paradox of this evening. I am inveighing against abstraction, generalization, and summary and analysis and interpretation in what terms? Abstract, general, analytical, and interpretive. Am I not? Well, that's the nature of human beings. There are things we have to express in this way.
Now, I've heard no gasps of recognition yet, but let me assume that some of you are thinking, Of course, this makes sense. Oh boy oh boy! If so, you and I are still going to have to be patient, because—you know what?—your understanding is still here in your head, and it's going to take a while to make all this part of your process.
If I had me to talk to me back when, I might not have had to write a million dreadful words. If I'd caught me at the right moment—and in the right spirit—I might have had to write only a quarter of a million—maybe not so many as that if I'd really listened. You might ask, why did he write five terrible novels? How many terrible novels can you write? The answer is that I had no idea how badly I was writing. None. And my ability to continue working through a million words was so rooted in self-deception that I might not have been able to hear this message. So those are the things you may have to sort through, too.
The special problem here is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won't let them think.
Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it's going to show.
Why is it so tough to get past that? Why does Kurosawa say that the essence of being an artist is that you can't avert your eyes? Why avert them? We still haven't quite made that connection. If the artist sees the chaos of experience and feels
order behind it and creates objects to express that order, surely that is reassuring, right? Well, at some point maybe. But what do you have to do first? And why is it so hard? This is why— and this is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us.
If I say art doesn't come from the mind, it comes from the place where you dream, you may say, "Well, I wake up screaming in the night. I don't want to go into my dreams, thank you very much. I don't want to go into that white-hot center; I've spent my life staying out of there. That's why I'm sitting in this classroom, why I was able to draw a comb through my hair this morning. Because I haven't gone there, I don't go there. I've got lots of ways of staying out of there." And you know what? You still need those ways twenty-one or twenty-two hours a day. But this is the tough part: for those two hours a day when you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place—it can't be white-hot and dark at the same time, but I don't care—that paradox, live with it—whatever scared the hell out of you down there— and there's plenty—you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can't flinch, can't walk away. That's the only way to create a work of art—even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily.
I fight this battle every day. Janet fights this battle every day. Every artist in the world fights this battle every day. To go to a scary place that makes some other part of you say: What are you doing1 No. Just no. No. No. Your hands are poised over the keyboard, and that voice says, Look at your fingernails; they need clipping. And when the voice has got you in the bathroom: Look at the toilet; it needs cleaning. And you say, Yes! Anything, anything but to go back and face this stuff.
Not only that. That voice wants to draw you up into your head. And you know what that head has been for you all your life? Everyone in this room, I'm sure, has been significantly smarter in all kinds of ways than the people around you. You've had your own view of things, and you haven't really followed the crowd, because you're a little too smart for that—or way too smart—and you see things in a different way. You're isolated. And in order to get through childhood and puberty and adolescence and young adulthood, broken relationships and a marriage or two, or four—you have identified with your mind. I'm smart, I'm smarter than they are. There's a part of your mind you've been rewarded for all through school, and that is your literal memory. You'll be rewarded for it again in classrooms in this same program. You remember things; you can talk these things back and command details. You know literature. You've always found your self-worth there, and what I'm telling you is that literal memory is your enemy. It's been a large part of your identity all your life, and that part is going to want to drag you down, to destroy the things you create. That's not an easy message to take.
Furthermore, you've got this self-conscious metavoice going all the time. I do, and I'm sure a lot of you do, too. You sit quietly and your metavoice is talking to you in your head. "Well, here I'm sitting," it says. And even, "OK, maybe I shouldn't think so much now. That sounds like it's something I probably should try, to see if I can do that." These words are going through your head, right? This is going on all the time; there's all this analytical garbage running through your mind. This self-conscious metavoice; it's a voice about the voice. It's like talking about my own consciousness.
This is why Catholics and Muslims have repetitive, predetermined prayers, why the Hindus and the Zen Buddhists and the Transcendental Meditationalists have their mantras. Because you repeat these repetitive predetermined prayers enough and they lose their meaning. So these words that have no rational meaning are falling through your mind. And what happens? The analytic flow stops. You prolong the moment of no voice in your head, and it induces a kind of spiritual high. The religions give this to you as a way to live, a way to get in touch with God.
Well, the artist has got to find a way to do something similar, although it cannot be—and this is harder for you— through repetitive, predetermined bits of text. Nevertheless, the only way to create a work of literary art is to stop that voice. Your total attention needs to be on the sensual flow of experience from the unconscious.
One of the ways of understanding your unconscious is by realizing that in order to get into it you have to actually stop that garbagey analytical reflex voice in your head and induce a kind of trance state. Religious trances are quite common. Well, there's a trance state also that the artist must induce in herself in order to create a work of art. You have to let go of that comforting, distancing voice, you have to then descend into that deep dream space of yours, and
that will result in a kind of superconcentration.
Psychologists call it the "flow state," being in the flow. Athletes call it being "in the zone."
The athlete's zone and the artist's creative trance have a great deal in common. When I was teaching in Louisiana, a friend of mine was assistant athletic director at LSU. His name was Greg LeFleur, and he was once an excellent tight end for the then St. Louis Cardinals NFL football team. Greg and I at some point came to understand that what he did and what I do have this need for a trancelike state in common.
How did Greg take off at full speed, run twenty-five, thirty yards down the field while behind him his quarterback— I think it was Jim Hart—launched this odd-shaped object into the air—and Greg is running full tilt down the field and two linebackers are converging on him to crush the life out of his body, and Greg glances over his shoulder and throws his body out, extends his hands, and this object settles gently under his fingertips and he holds it even as he falls to the ground and the linebackers fall on top of him. How did he do that?
Well, I tell you how you don't do it and that's by thinking about it. Any athlete will tell you. Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, said in his autobiography that when you drive a car really fast and really well, you don't have a sensation of speed at all; things slow down around you, you can count the bricks on the wall at the next turn. Baseball players, when they are batting and in a streak, say they can count the stitches on the ball. They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. They call it muscle memory. But for you, it's not muscle memory; it's dream space, it's sense memory. It is not literal memory, the thing that's made you good at school.
If the athlete begins to send the process into his head, he goes into a slump. He misses the basket, he misses that turn. Lights out. He drops the ball. I think, by the way, that's why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you're less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it's technique, you think about it. If it's your socks, it's not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that's what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.
Now, there's one big difference between the athlete's zone and the artist's zone. And this is another way of explaining the challenge of Kurosawa's observation. Let's look at Michael Jordan in his later prime—let's say his last season with the Bulls, when they once again won the world championship. When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father's chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan's life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist's zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist.
The great British novelist Graham Greene said that all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. I want you to remember that Graham Greene quotation—though in fact it's a paraphrase because I can't remember the quote—because in a compost heap, things decompose. Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that's what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art.
You can see where I'm going. Greene's compost of the imagination is the same as the dreamspace, the white-hot center of the unconscious. The point he's making is that not only is your mind the enemy, not only is your will, your ra-tional thinking, your analytic thinking the enemy, but your literal memories are also the enemy. How many times have you heard a short story criticized and heard the author say,
That's the way it happened. It can't be unreal because it happened that way.
But a work of art is an organic thing. Every detail must organically resonate with every other detail. If you have an intransigent literal memory—and intransigent is what literal memories are—it sits in the middle of the organic object; it destroys everything around it. Everything in a work must remain malleable, everything must remain negotiable. You need to understand that working from your literal memory will keep you out of your unconscious, out of the zone you must enter.
I'm going to give you some practical suggestions on how to get into your zone or dreamspace. The first of those suggestions is, in fact, more than merely practical; it is rooted in the psychology of creation. Once you are engaged in writing a piece of fiction from your unconscious, it is crucial that you write every day, because the nature of this place where you go is such that it's very difficult to find your way in. It's pure torture. But even though it's terrible getting in, once you're in, if you keep going back every day, though it's still always daunting and difficult and scary, it's not nearly so much so. You may find—this is dangerous, but you may find—that you can take a day off every six or seven days. When you do, you'll be grumpy and out of sorts and things will be uncomfortable, but after a day you can go back in. But you take two days off and you're on very thin ice. If you let three or four days go by it's as if you've never written a word in your entire life. That doorway closes and seals itself up; you don't even know what part of the wall that door's in anymore. I don't care how much
you've written in your life; those defenses are strong and they won't let you go there.
You may not be ready to write yet, but when you're in a project you must write every day. You cannot write just on weekends. You cannot write this week and not next; you can't-wait for the summer to write. You can't skip the summer and wait till the fall. You have to write every day. You cannot do it any other way. Have I said this strongly enough?
There are no excuses not to write. At some point in my life, for various personal reasons, the only opportunity I had to write was on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted from my home in Long Island to a job as editor-in-chief of a business newspaper in Manhattan. This was before laptop computers. I wrote every word of my first four published novels on my lap, on legal pads, by hand, on the Long Island Rail Road, where the air-conditioning never worked in the summer, and the heat never worked in the winter, and it was always jam-packed, and people were flapping their papers and yakking and killing each other over the wrong bridge bid three seats up in front of me.
But eventually a thing kicked in that psychologists used to call functional fixedness. That is, if you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task. So getting over the hump of distraction with those railroad trips eventually became an asset, because writing was all I ever did on the train; I did nothing else. And I began to write well. I wrote my first four published novels on that train.
So here's one of those practical suggestions for getting into the zone. Find a place and some objects that you go to and engage only when you're writing fiction. If you have only one space and one computer that you must use for all written things, then change the type font you use for your fiction or the color of your screen.
By the way, I finally got a teaching job that took me off the train. I got my Ph.D. at the "University of Knopf"—that is, I accumulated enough publishing credits to get a university teaching job—and I went to McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I was halfway through my fifth novel—it was already under contract to Knopf and my editor loved the first half and I did too—and I had to stop writing to drive my furniture across the c
ountry in a U-Haul, finish buying a house, and move in. I stopped writing for eight weeks. And when I returned to the novel, though I knew those characters as well as any real person I've ever known, and though I knew what was going to happen next in the plot, it was utter agony to return to the work. It took eight weeks of daily torture to write another sentence—because I'd stopped writing every day. Also, if you develop functional fixedness to help you, you can't then let it be an excuse not to write. If you are away from the conditions you've established, you must still write every day. For a while I blamed my not writing on the fact that the room wasn't moving. I thought I was going to have to buy a little motor and stick it on my chair to jiggle it. Maybe buy choo-choo sounds for my record player. But of course the real problem was the broken link to my unconscious caused by putting the work aside for a time.
Another practical way to facilitate your entry into your writing zone is to turn yourself into a morning person. If you arrange your life so that you can spend two hours writing—or an hour, given the exigencies of some working lives, but ideally a couple of hours—you make that time sacrosanct at the beginning of the day. If you need coffee, you put your coffee on a timer, you roll out of bed, you grab that cup of coffee, and you are at your computer keyboard only moments from a literal dreamspace.
Finding a way to clear your sensibility of abstract uses of language is important to get into the trance. The problem is that we naturally use language in so many nonsensual ways all through the day. I find it helpful, then, to buffer those hours in which you necessarily use language in those analytical ways from the hours in which you dive into your unconscious and seek language in quite another way. One obvious way to do that is to put your night's sleep in between. You go into your writing space straight from another dream state and go to language before you've had a chance for all those other uses of language to intrude on you. So after you wake up, don't read the newspaper, don't watch CNN; if you have to pee don't pick up the back issue of The New Yorker in the basket nearby. You go to your fiction writing without letting any conceptual language into your head.
From Where You Dream Page 2