Spontaneity, Wit, Improvisation, and Automatic Writing: How to Write Better Than Your Conscious Mind

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):

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.

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:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 8: When Is a Work of Literature Finished?

Some say never. James Joyce was notorious for correcting his books till the very last second before he had to turn them over to the publisher—and after. When Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake was republished in 1945, four years after Joyce’s death, it appeared with a sixteen-page booklet of errata that Joyce had compiled after the first edition.

James Joyce

At the other end of the spectrum, there is automatic writing, where the author makes no edits. André Breton, creator of automatic writing, used this title for his guide to spontaneous composition in The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924):

SECRETS OF THE MAGICAL

SURREALIST ART

Written Surrealist composition

or

first and last draft

This approach to writings holds that the most spontaneous, least edited utterances are the most finished. Why? Because, according to this aesthetic, the closer we get to the bubbling spring of our imagination, the more perfect the results.

André Breton

That may be true for some writers—Jack Kerouac’s continuous roll of paper used to write On the Road comes to mind. (Someone should write a thesis on the connections between the Surrealists and the Beats!) But I think the law of averages is against spontaneity in literature. It’s like playing roulette and always betting on 22 black. You’ll win big every once in a while, but what about all the other times? How can you sustain that? In literature, as opposed to jazz, for example, spontaneity is hit or miss. More often, it’s miss. This may be because literature requires a critical and self-critical appraisal of the world and of one’s own writings.

In my own writing, I do countless drafts. I print out my work after each series of revisions because the human eye simply reads paper differently than it reads a computer screen.

At a certain point in the revision process, I realize that I’ve reached a spot where the changes I’m making are no longer improving the text. They are merely changing it. At this stage, I’m also switching things back and forth, inserting the same phrases I deleted earlier. When I get to this crossroads, I feel a work is done.

But I’ve also had the experience of thinking that one of my poems was finished, and then reading it in print several years later and feeling it really needed editing. I tweaked many of the poems in my book The Number Before Infinity when the second edition was released in 2014. Why? Years are like prescription lenses. They sharpen our vision.

I did notice when I reread my book before the new edition appeared that most of the poems I wanted to edit were not the poems I liked best. The poems that were my favorites, the ones I choose for readings, had assumed their final form more easily and earlier. Those I mostly left in peace.

I think each writer has to develop a personal sense of when a work is done, just as each writer has to develop a writing process. The answers will be different for different writers, just as James Joyce and André Breton, who were contemporaries, developed diametrically opposite writing methods around the same time, and both in Paris. These two writers were both fascinated by the subconscious and how it could reshape literature, but in Breton’s case, it was the spontaneity of the subconscious that mattered, while in Joyce’s case, showing the workings of the subconscious or superconscious involved a meticulous collage of words and fragments from a kaleidoscope of sources.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer