When a
person is about to say something funny during a conversation, they start to
speak without forming an idea of what words to use. A witty comment usually begins
with only a vague impulse that the moment and the context are ripe for humor.
This is an intuitive feeling, and it’s the act of launching into the
conversation that helps the speaker to form the specific words that make people
laugh.
Similarly,
when a jazz musician is about to start a solo, I don’t think that person has a
clear idea what they are going to play. It’s just a willingness to jump in and
get into the groove the band has set in motion that provides the impulse for
that riff.
Automatic
writing is also like that. Writers in the surrealist movement in the early
1920s invented automatic writing—André Breton described the process this way in
his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924):
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| Portraits of André Breton by Man Ray |
Put
yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about
your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding
yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will
not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have
written.
In other
words, write faster than you can edit with your rational mind, and the results
will outpace anything you thought you could create.
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| The surrealist group practicing automatic writing in the 1920s |
The human
mind is far more brilliant than our conscious mind. One of the challenges
of writing is to let go of our thoughts so that we can actually think with our
deeper psyche. Not with the reptilian brain, but with the brain powered by what
Federico García Lorca described as the duende,
the mischievous sprite that rises from the raw energy of the Earth.
Of course,
this dynamic often applies more to poetry than to prose. Fiction and nonfiction
writers have to plan, outline, create structure. But poetry thrives on this
sort of spontaneous fabrication, taking flight from a platform that is itself
already airborne. Or, to paraphrase André Breton, “Trust in the inexhaustible
fountain of whispers.”
I don’t
mean to suggest that all spontaneous writing is great. Some of it can be
downright foolish. But I would say that spontaneity is the source of much of
the best and most unexpected writing.
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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle