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

How Long Does It Take to Finish a Piece of Writing?

It could take a few minutes to finish a work of literature, and it could take a few decades. It depends in part on your method of composition, and the texture of the text you’re weaving. (Both text and texture come from the Latin verb texere, to weave.) It also depends on how prepared you are to embark on the project you’ve selected.

One method of composition that the writer finishes rapidly is automatic writing, a technique invented by André Breton and the French surrealists.

 

Members of the surrealist group in Paris. André Breton is third from the left.

In automatic writing, the author dreams onto the page, allowing the subconscious to dictate to the hand. The writer deliberately attempts to write faster than s/he can think, letting the deepest parts of the mind create a spontaneous cascade of images:

And as a

Little girl

Caught in a bellows of sparkles

You jump rope

Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia

Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway

I caress everything that was you

In everything that’s yet to be you

André Breton, “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself,” from The Air of the Water, in Earthlight, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow

In this poem, Breton creates a dreamlike collage of his beloved at various moments in her life, layering each sequence on the next. To generate an image such as “You jump rope/Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia/Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway,” no amount of editing or rewriting is of use. Only the first-take, last-take method of writing, where the author doesn’t stanch the mind’s spring of creativity, is effective. Scholars have gone over Breton’s drafts and found that he edited very little. Ben Jonson famously said of the legend that Shakespeare never blotted a line of his scripts, “Would he had blotted a thousand!” Maybe Breton should have edited his writings more. But when the spontaneous method of composition works, it produces a unique and loose weave of language, an amazing texture that a more laborious method usually can’t reproduce. This is the few-minutes version of finishing a poem.

But there are other types of writing that require a much more time-consuming process. James Joyce reportedly took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and there is a story that he was still making edits until the publisher’s messenger snatched the overdue manuscript out of his hands. Elizabeth Bishop’s book The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 is all of 287 pages, meaning she only produced an average of one page of poetry every two months. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Certain types of writing just can’t be done quickly, because the texture of language requires a very tight weave that can only be accomplished with many drafts, and much revision:

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

Bishop’s exquisite description of the Favrile surfaces of the wheelbarrows does not seem like a momentary inspiration, but rather a meticulous accumulation of precise details combined with le mot juste, a carefully chosen phrase such as “plastered” or “coats of mail.” That’s the kind of writing that takes many drafts.

Another reason that a work of literature may need a long time to complete is that we often come up with ideas before we have the skill and knowledge to realize them. More than once, I’ve had the experience of rereading a poem I published decades before, and seeing that I had had a genuine impulse behind the poem, but I hadn’t gotten it right. The diction or the imagery or the ending weren’t quite what the original idea was pleading for. With more years of experience, I was able to revise a poem that I thought was complete, but really needed one or two more drafts.

So, how long does it take to finish a piece of writing? That’s a bit like asking how long it takes to fall in love. It might happen with a moment’s encounter, or it might be decades in the making.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

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

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1

 

The best way to avoid becoming a literary dropout is to keep writing. As all of us know, that’s easier said than done. There are many elements to keeping the writing flowing. I’ll try to cover several in this series of blogs.

To begin with, I’ll start with factors that relate just to the writing itself, and not to circumstances peripherally connected to, or outside of the writing.

The first suggestion I’d make is to choose projects that you can complete successfully. I had a terrific student several years ago, a guy who had a remarkable facility for spontaneous writing. Our class was studying the surrealist movement at the time. I asked the students to attempt automatic writing as a learning exercise. Automatic writing is a type of writing devised by the surrealist group in Paris in the early 1920s as a way of liberating the subconscious. In automatic writing you don’t edit or look back at what you’ve already written but compose spontaneously, as if dreaming onto the page. It’s a great exercise if you’re suffering from writer’s block or just want to warm up. The student I’m referring to was one of the few I’ve ever encountered who could create a finished piece of work using automatic writing. The whole class was amazed at what he created during that in-class exercise, without editing. If he had lived in Paris in the 1920s, he’d be a legend.

Surrealist group in Paris practices automatic writing

Now, you would think that a person who can compose literature so fluently would have absolutely no trouble finishing a longer work. Poof! You sit down, you write, it’s done. But that wasn’t the case. For his MFA thesis, he attempted to write a sort of modern-day Dante’s Inferno. A worthy project. The task was almost impossible, though, since the way he set it up, not one of the characters interacted with anyone but the narrator. Not only that, but we knew that each story ended with the death of the person recounting it, since all the characters besides the narrator were ghosts. And there was a talking-head aspect to the format that killed almost all of the drama.

You should be extremely ambitious in the projects you pick for yourself as a writer, but don’t choose a project that you can never finish, or that won’t interest many people even if you do finish it. Stretch yourself, be daring in your aesthetic choices, do things that no one has attempted before, but don’t try to climb Mount Denali on rollerskates.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
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

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer