From Where You Dream (4 page)

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.

I almost always write to music, and that might be helpful to some of you. I've almost never written any fiction without carefully chosen music, usually classical or jazz, almost always without words—I've been known to write to Puccini, though if I understood Italian I probably couldn't. But whatever helps you go into your trance state—whether quiet is right or music helps—in any case, you do need to be visiting your unconscious every day.

The crucial awareness you must keep is this: do not will the work. Do not write until it's coming from your unconscious. If you have the itch to write before inspiration has visited you, spend that time meditating in your unconscious. That said, there is a type of journaling that I could recommend, especially at this stage of your development. Most journaling is counterproductive. Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don't do that. But here's a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an
emotion
in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—
only
—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions. Such a journal entry will read like a passage in a novel, like the most intense moment-to-moment scene in a novel. And that's all that will be there. Fully developed in the moment.

If you write in your journal every day in this way, and if you spend forty-five minutes or an hour at it, it will be so intensive that you might not get through the whole incident.

That's fine. Just break it off, don't try to summarize or bring it to the end. Next day you might pick it up again. Or not. Go for some other piece of another emotional event. And don't rely so heavily on the sense reactions within your body that when you read this fifteen years from now all you get is "palpitating heart" and "sweating palms" and "blurry vision," which could be reactions to anything. This should be rendered as if it were a scene, with all the external and internal events.

After you've got a couple of weeks' worth of these entries, the entry of two weeks ago will have had a chance to cool off. From then on, each day's journaling should have two parts to it. First, write a new entry. Then, when you've finished, go back and read the journal entry of two weeks ago, and with a marker pen slash through all the examples of abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation you see in the text, leaving only moment-to-moment sense-based events and impressions. No matter how much you intended to write "in the moment," I promise you those old habits will have come back, but the hope is that, over the course of time, the red marks will diminish.

Even if you're doing a sense-based journal, you're going to have serious trouble between your creative projects. This is when you'll understand why the need to write every day runs so deep. When I've finished a work, and some time passes, and I'm working up to something new, I feel that I am utterly wasting my life. I do trivial, ghastly, quotidian stuff; I hate myself; I complain about myself to my wife, and that hatred daily increases. Finally she says to me, "Honey, it's OK, you've now reached total self-loathing; you're about to start writing." She's always right. Soon thereafter, the door opens up to my unconscious, to my new work, and I leap in. And then I write every day and I am scared every day and I am happy every day.

A word about writer's block here. I think writer's block probably suggests that you have an artist's instinct. Bad writers never get blocked. Writers who write from their heads and are comfortable doing that—they always have some garbage to put down. 1 talked last week about the flow of metathink-ing, metaspeaking your mind. That stuffs always there and it's easy to put it on the page. I think most writers who get blocked do so because some important part of them knows that they've got to get to the unconscious. But they're not getting there; they're thinking too much, so there's nothing there. Except it's not quite nothing—you sit there thinking, fussing, and worrying: "Gee, I'm not writing," "I've got to write now and I'm not writing," "Oh my God, I'm not writing," "If I want to be a writer I've got to write and I'm not writing." I think writer's block of that sort is the most common kind among writers who have any talent.

Writer's block is very similar to insomnia. What happens in insomnia? You lie down, intending to go into your dream-space, literally; into the depths of your unconscious, where you totally lose touch with the outer world. That's what sleep is. But you can't do it. Why? Because you can't turn your mind off. You lie there thinking about things. And if there are images, it's only because you're carefully controlling them. You sometimes have a kind of daydream going on, but you're in charge of it. You're making it happen, and you get upset about this and you think about that and you argue about this, and all the time there's this "Gee, I still am not sleeping, am I?" and, "OK, there's my mother. Gee, I'm thinking about her. I don't want to think about my mother, she makes me mad. What would I say to her if she called right now? I'd tell her. .." That's what's going on in your head, right?

What happens when you finally do fall asleep? Suddenly an image comes out of nowhere: a rainy street, a street lamp, a dog barking. Whoa, where did that come from? Nowhere. And at the moment that image comes, if you ask, "Well, where
did
that come from?"—it's gone; nothing will follow and you've got thirty-five more minutes of being awake.

Those of you who
don't
have trouble with insomnia, think about how you go to sleep. You lie down and all that garbage just turns off. Suddenly an image comes, and another, and boy, then you're gone. And that's how you write.

It's a funny state. It's not as if you're falling asleep at your computer, but neither are you brainstorming. You're
dreamstorming,
inviting the images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconscious. It's very much like an intensive daydream, but a daydream that you are and are not controlling. You let it go, but it's coming through language that you're putting on a screen, so there is some intervention on your part, and yet the essence of it—that rainy street and that dog barking and the lamplight—are nothing you're going after consciously. The state of communion with your unconscious—the zone I'm trying to describe—is absolutely essential,
absolutely essential
to writing well in this art form.

Where does language come into this very-hard-to-describe, mystical sort of place—what I'm calling your unconscious— when you create a work of art? When I talk about the place of language in this process, it's another way to speak of voice. Voice
is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious.
When you turn off that flow of garbage in your head, you're turning off certain kinds of words—you're turning off abstract and analytical metawords. What then takes their place is a very strong presence of language, but it's almost misleading to call it language because language is so often used in those ways that mean analysis, abstraction. That's why I say voice. The presence of words—which you quickly capture and string together and massage—is intimately bound up with that sensual imagery in your unconscious, which makes up your voice and the voices of your characters.

The line-to-line words come from your unconscious and so does the very form in which you write. You do not know whether you're a novelist or a short story writer. You don't choose ahead of time to be a novelist and then look around in yourself and figure out what novels you've got there. You have a vision of the world and that vision has a natural form; you don't know what will turn out to be the natural form of your vision. You've probably had the experience of writing a short story that just kind of takes off. It's not a very good story, because what you're seeing really wants to be a novel. Or you sit down trying to write a novel and you poop out at about page 40. That happens because you are forcing your vision into a predetermined medium, and that's not the way it should work.

The distinction between the vision that becomes a novel and the vision that becomes a short story is pretty much like this (I'm going to describe these differences metaphorically; I am not advocating a consciousness of your audience): the short story will have you say to the reader, "Look, I don't have much time. So sit down, let me tell you about a moment in this character's life when something took a turn, or something intensified in some significant way." The short story will have, oftentimes, a brief sequence of causally linked events, but ultimately it turns on
the moment.

The novel is going to be saying to your reader, "Look, this is going to take some time. Let's go for a long walk, and I want to tell you about all these things that happened in the life of this character in my unconscious; all these things that happened to him, which somehow fit together, are somehow causally linked." In a novel, there will be many revealing moments but ultimately the focus of a novel is on that—I won't call it a chain, because that argues for a certain kind of linear structure, but—that certain configuration of causally linked events. That's the focus of a novel.

Oftentimes I've found that my novels come out of the wedding of two separate visions that seemed to be two different novels, two books that really weren't working and seemed quite different from each other. (I've got a number of potential novels and stories running around in my unconscious at any given meditative moment.)

Let me go back to one of those really god-awful novels that never saw the light of day, my first Vietnam-based novel, called
What Lies Near.
It was about a guy in military intelligence who visits the holding cell in an interrogation camp for suspected Viet Cong. He goes into a cell vacated by a prisoner who's been tortured and taken somewhere else, and he finds a piece of graffiti written on the wall. The novel I wrote was just straight out of literal memory stuff. As a military intelligence agent, I had gone to an interrogation center run by the ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which is South Vietnamese—and there was a cell where they kept the Viet Cong prisoners while they tortured them—horribly, as the South Vietnamese often did. I went in the cell and—these are the tropics; it was a hundred degrees and 95 percent humidity outside this windowless space about six feet square, which had an iron door with a little plate kept shut and a stone ledge for sleeping and a hole in the floor—I stepped in and instantly broke into a heavy sweat from the closeness of the air and the foul smells from the hole in the floor, and the walls were stained with lichen, and I was ready to turn and flee.

But—I don't know what made me think of this—I wondered about graffiti. Was there some trace of the people left behind? I looked at the walls, and there were obviously some places that had been scratched—the scratchings then obliterated by the caretakers of the place. Very carefully monitored. There was nothing else to see, and I was about to leave when I noticed a little wooden stand against one wall. I thought, well, if somebody wanted to put some graffiti where it would survive scrutiny, he'd put it behind that. So I pulled that stand away from the wall and suddenly heard the frantic rustle of brittle little feet, and dozens of three-inch cockroaches scattered from behind this thing—just that last turn of the horror of the place: these people are kept in darkness with roaches crawling all over, waiting to be tortured—and, sure enough, there was a piece of graffiti scratched into the wall behind the wooden stand.

It read,
"Ve siuh la khoe,"
which means, "Hygiene is healthful."

Suddenly I was in the presence of this remarkable mind. To have that kind of irony, that kind of detachment!

Well, I wrote the terrible novel called
What Lies Near,
in which the agent finds this graffiti and then spends the rest of the novel trying to track down the guy who wrote it. I myself didn't try to track him down; the novel was driven by what had happened there, in that cell, and I was just sort of tunnel' visioned onto it. It was slavish to what really happened, and that was not enough to sustain a novel. It was not a novel.