Making things up

 In case you were wondering where all that came from on the post below, some of it had to do with finding  myself reading both The Decameron and Philip K. Dick's Valis. Both powerful books and a wild mix. The one had me thinking about setting up a separate blog to publish fictions (I still may do this) because Boccaccio gets to the central nervous system of story; the other asks about God, identity, the world--like all Phil Dick books do--but this time he's speaking through rents in the narrative fabric, and its vastly more intense and vastly more uncomfortable--and exhilarating. Throw them both into short term memory, mix well with  current events, garnish with a few remaining flu germs and volià.

But in trying to come up with something to write about (more and more difficult as I paint more and more corners in the Palace of Wisdom) it occurred to me to talk about things occurring to me. Or, if you will, to take a stab at answering the perennial question, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Writers rightfully roll their eyes when they're asked this fatuity in interviews. There's even the famous official Science Fiction Writers of America answer: that there's a P.O. Box in Schenectady, New York, where if you sent a dollar, you will get an idea by return post. My personal answer is, "Lots of drugs." It's a silly question, but I've said before that you can  get some interesting stuff if you actually try to answer silly questions.

Back in college, there was this beautiful vivacious young woman named Loree Unger, whom I would have loved to have had as a girlfriend, but who vanished before I knew it, and had to settle for a wonderful intense romantic  intellectual episode. We went into Jimmy's one afternoon, and she affixed me with a glittering stare and said, "Tell me a story." I took this to mean a story of mine, and a new one, and I furiously stumbled through something. When I was done she smiled and said "Tell me another." I thought I was a genius and a poet and the next great writer but I was sweating like a novice running through a kata as I strove desperately to connect with the genius, vision, and invention I knew was there somewhere. For that and a whole lot else I'm forever in her debt.

I did learn to dance: at my peak at Marvel I was doing about a book a week, and sometimes more. I did wonder when the block would hit me, but it never did. And though I've been quiet for like 18 years (less'n you count the  unpublished novels etc. in the drawer) I know it hasn't left me. I give myself little tests every once in a while, and I know I could still do it. (How good or how accessible they'd be is another thing entirely, but unless I deliberately sabotage my own instincts [sometimes a good idea] it does not not come.)

As a public demonstration, here's a sample of me starting to write without any idea of what I'm going to do, done real time, with only spellcheck to clean it up:

He stood in the shadow of the great metal structure, and watched as the searchlights crossed its monstrosity now and again. His clothes were badly torn and smeared with something he couldn't smell, and he carried a stiff crinkly woman's dress in his right hand, and if there was desperation, only the right hand had it. 

The machines were the only ones out at this hour, or almost: there were great floods of dogs that poured fearfully through the cracks several levels down, and there were lovers and criminals and the avengers that stopped crime and started love with their pale eyes an massive bodies.

He had to run, though, because none of that applied to him, and the things that chased him, or were about to, would ignore the city like a torch would ignore a cobweb. 

He clicked his fingers, and stuff began to roll down them, sharp smelling and exciting. The dress burst into flame and he dropped it, and it hissed like an angry cat.

He bent down and grabbed the paving stones, and they began to come apart as he began to tunnel.

OK, that's enough for right now. I've often done this, then pick it apart, find explanations for the questions the text raises, flesh it out, and come up with a well constructed story out of it. It's not the only way I work, but I do it a lot.

The question is, where did that come from?

I don't know. It sure doesn't seem to be the subconscious, because it's way way too structured. Looking at it I can guess the origins of some of it--in this case, the background derives from various retro/dystopian fantasy cities, like Katzuhiro Otomo's Steamboy, Frank Miller's Sin City and so forth. But that came unbidden. Some of it's plain obvious: Danger Tension, Mystery, violence, sex. All that was probably packaged when I the ego said to that mysterious brain department, "Write a narrative." But none of this was conscious choice. I shut the menu and told the waiter to surprise me. But who the hell is the waiter?

This may also be not generalizable. In fact, it's in direct opposition to the assumptions made (for religious purposes) by Dorothy L. Sayers in The Mind of the Maker--that as creative writing always starts from the idea,so much God's creation so begin. Maybe Ms. Sayers never did this in her life. Maybe D. H. Lawrence never did it--maybe it wouldn't work, maybe they'd never think of it. Maybe they never sat with Loree Unger in a dark afternoon bar, and maybe they never worked at pulp-writer speed for a dozen years. All I can tell you is what I don't know about myself, not what I don't know about others.

What comes to me certainly isn't conscious by intent, but it's not subconscious by structure. Were I to write stories while asleep, they probably wouldn't have the hack writer's gloss to them. The term preconscious (just the term, thanks, not the Freudian structure behind it) seems to describe it best: crafted using my training, but without the intentionality that the ego gives it.

I'll tell you what it feels like: it's a vast burbling substrate of stuff: dreams, movies, pitchers, facts, narratives, conversations, panoramas, all dipped into forgetfulness and bobbing up again in pieces now strangely interassociated. And all I need to do (that is, before the conscious craft takes over) is dip into the Matmos, pull something out of it, and say what a good boy am I!

I used t say that I have a very noisy head. I think that's still true. I feed the noise every chance I get, with as much good stuff as I can lay my hands on, 'good' being a nearly meaningless term. It is my experience that nothing seams to be wasted: the stuff that doesn't make its way into my organized file of knowledge finds its way into the french canadian bean soup whence I get my ideas.

This might be a universal phenomenon: it might be that all you really have to do to get in touch with your creativity is be still and listen to that burbling substrate, grab images and scenes and work with them. But I don't know: maybe people in general don't have noisy heads. Boy would I look stupid propagating that as a universal principle.

It could be that I owe Loree more than I thought for that brief afternoon's whack of the Zen master's stick. Maybe I've spent the rest of my life sitting in that bar, answering that beautiful woman's demands.

(And maybe, of course, both.)

(Psst: hey Loree, if you're out there, Google yourself. It'll bring you here. I miss you.)