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

Steve Bannon on the Culture and Reason for Being of the United States—A Different View

In his talk to the Conservative Political Action Committeein National Harbor, Maryland, on February 23, 2017, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said about the United States, “We are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.” Oddly enough, I agree with the ultra-conservative Bannon on this point—but I completely disagree with his definition of the culture and reason for being of the United States.

I think that Bannon and Trump believe in a culture of the U.S. that is dominated by one group—white Christians. In fact, their actions are all aimed at creating a world lorded over by nations where white Christians rule. Every one of their policies points toward this: the travel ban on six predominantly Muslim countries, the denial of the Black Lives Matter movement in favor of a blanket law-and-order policy, the expulsion of immigrants from Latin America who have put down deep roots in the United States, the building of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, the embrace of Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian state in Russia. Clearly the “reason for being” of the United States in the mind of Steve Bannon is for white Christians to predominate in America and globally.

What is the alternative to this culture and nation of white Christian domination? There is another concept of the United States that generations of Americans have been working toward, from the demonstrations of the suffragettes, to the pro-union strikers who occupied the GM plant in Flint in 1936, to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, to the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, to the Native American encampment resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline. That idea of the United States is one based on the most enlightened and progressive strains of the American Revolution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women!] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” as Thomas Jefferson so beautifully phrased it in the Declaration of Independence.

That fundamental belief in the equality of all people and the sanctity of life is the true reason for being of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed that vision of the U.S. when he said in his “I Have a Dream”speech: “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The culture of the United States is not a private club. It is an open culture rooted in the traditions of Native Americans and added to by every wave of arrivals to this country from every latitude and longitude of dry land on the globe.

The culture of the United States is inherently a hybrid culture. American culture blends melodies from Scotch-Irish fiddlers with Yoruba drumming patterns to create jazz and country music. American culture combines the humor of Yiddish theater and vaudeville with the theatrics of the English stage to give birth to Hollywood movies. In American culture, lesbian feminist poets write in the ghazal form devised by Arabic troubadours and elaborated by Persian bards. American culture wants to try out knishes with Spanish rice, it needs to taste Korean kimchee in Mexican burritos. It fuses ballet and African dance and creates Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor.

Yes, the United States has a reason for being and a culture. That culture and that reason for being are fundamentally democratic, pluralistic, and multicultural. Nothing that “the Donald” or Steve Bannon can do will ever change that.

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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
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

The Influence of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

I just finished listening to the audiobook of William Faulkner’s celebrated novel Absalom, Absalom! The book has had a major influence on world literature, but, ironically, not always in Faulkner’s home country, the U.S.A.

William Faulkner

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner creates a complex plot structure that is one of the novel’s most unusual features. That meandering architecture does have its antecedents—Ford Madox Ford’s groundbreaking work of fiction The Good Soldier springs to mind.

The tales of the various narrators in Absalom, Absalom! are filtered through the voice of Quentin Compson, a Harvard undergraduate from the rural Mississippi town of Jefferson, where most of the book’s action takes place. Quentin tells the story in 1910 to his roommate, Shreve, though the timeframe of the story is mostly mid-19^th century.

But the plot is not a linear progression through history. Instead, the story unfolds in temporal loops that keep circling back to certain key events, revealing with each telling another part of what occurred in a particular episode. As the loops around a certain incident accumulate, the reader is able to assemble a more complete picture of that event. These loops are like the twists of a cord, or the frills at the edge of a doily, moving forward, but never in a straight line.

At one point in the novel, Faulker beautifully describes the worldview that underlies his highly original method of storytelling:

“Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm …”

In other words, each event in a story resonates with every other event, whether we realize the connections or not, just as the characters in the novel seem to repeat the same actions from generation to generation. Thomas Sutpen, the Southern, self-made partriarch who is the dominant figure in the novel, marries two women without divorcing the first. The son that he never acknowledged from his first marriage similarly attempts bigamy, but … well, I won’t reveal what happens for those who haven’t read the novel. It’s like a cycle of Greek tragedies on a Southern plantation, and then some.

Absalom, Absalom! has been described as “Southern Gothic” but I don’t think there’s a lot of the Gothic in Faulkner’s book. To me, “Gothic” implies the presence of otherworldly beings and phenomena, and the characters of Absalom, Absalom! are very much of this world. What could be more material than Thomas Sutpen’s relentless, Balzacian energy to procreate and to build and rebuild his plantation? I would describe Faulkner’s novel as Southern baroque, since it has the ornateness, grandeur, and sensuality of a baroque basilica.

The style of the novel also has a leisurely, baroque flow. Here’s a passage from the opening paragraphs that gives a flavor of the book’s style, which makes it such a pleasure to hear certain sections of the novel read out loud in a Mississippi drawl:

“Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.”

OK, there are some weird otherworldly beings there. You’ve got to take a long leap of faith to read this book.

The novel’s baroque diction and plot were a tremendous influence on several of the greatest South American magical realist writers, particularly in novels such as GabrielGarcía Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Autumn of the Patriarch. I would add Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral (which you should read if you haven’t—fantastic book!), and Manuel Puig’s wonderful saga, Heartbreak Tango.

It’s curious to me that so few writers of Faulkner’s own country have emulated either his style or his plot structure. He is one of the few North Americans to win the Nobel Prize for literature, isn’t he? I do think Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz has some of Absalom, Absalom in its winding plot structure and the ornateness of its language.

Maybe part of the problem is that Faulkner is a complicated case when it comes to race and gender, and who wants to touch complexity in this day and age? Faulkner probably thought of himself as an enlightened person when it came to those issues, at least in the context of the time when Absalom, Absalom! was published, which was 1936. And in some ways Faulkner was enlightened. There is a character in the novel who nails himself into his own attic and starves to death rather than be drafted into the Confederate army during the Civil War. The book discusses relationships between the races. Those were certainly taboo subjects for a White Southern writer to depict at that time. Despite those moments in the book, Faulkner could be faulted over and over for his obsessive use of the “n” word and his stereotypical description of African Americans. The women characters in the novel are paper dolls. For those of us still living with the legacy of the history Faulkner describes in Absalom, Absalom!, the book is a grab bag as a role model for other writers.

Or is it that Faulkner’s baroque, Southern sensibility is not in tune with the WYSIWIG culture of Puritan America? Who has time for a sentence that goes on for the better part of a page in a world where stock market trades are logged by the millionth of a second? I experienced this firsthand when I was listening to the audiobook of Absalom, Absalom! on the way to work. I would arrive at the parking lot at my office and I couldn’t shut off the narrative till the actor reading the book came to a stopping point, so I would sit in my car for a couple of minutes while the time ticked away making me later and later for work, and I paused in my ancient Toyota Corolla listening to Faulkner’s sazerac-infused prose, waiting for that beautiful, winding river of a sentence to finally reach its delta.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

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

Haruki Murakami and Globalization

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, a novel that takes place in the space of only seven hours in Tokyo. The plot follows four main characters and several minor characters from midnight to dawn of one day in the grungy downtown entertainment district. I didn’t like the novel as much as Murakami’s stellar The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, or his short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, but After Dark does have a couple of classic Murakami scenes where he is at his best, and those scenes alone make the novel worthwhile.

Haruki Murakami with jazz records

Murakami is a master at creating a situation where two characters encounter one another by chance and start talking deeply, and suddenly their hearts and thoughts spring open up in a way that is extraordinary and reveals surprising truths.

I love Murakami's writing, so I was quite surprised when I heard him taken to task at an international symposium on literature I attended a few years ago. At the Third Seoul International Forum for Literature in 2011, eminent Korean scholar Yu Jong-ho, professor emeritus at Yonsei University, criticized Murakami at a session where I also spoke on “The Globalizing World and the Human Community.” Though his criticisms of Murakami didn’t focus on the globalization of literature per se, Professor Yu’s comments appeared to me to be prompted in part by the Westernized cultural references in Murakami’s fiction.

After Dark is a prime example. Though the novel takes place in Tokyo, it begins in a Denny’s Restaurant. There are numerous discussions of music in the book, partly because one of the main characters, Takahashi Tetsyta, is an aspiring jazz trombonist. Almost all the music referred to in Murakami’s novel is from the U.S.A. or the U.K. All the food the characters eat is Western, from chicken salad (there are some hilarious bits about Denny’s chicken salad!) to tuna sandwiches to a fluffy omelet (which, like the love that develops between the two protagonists, is never actually indulged in).

One of the only things in the novel that is distinctively Japanese is a love hotel, not exactly what you’d call classic East Asian culture. Even the love hotel is named for a Jean-Luc Godard movie, Alphaville (sometimes After Dark seems to take place in the futuristic world of Godard’s Alphaville).

So, is this a problem that Murakami’s characters seem to move in a world where Japanese culture, so rich and venerable, no longer seems to exist? The references that Murakami’s characters make to vintage jazz tunes, which he knows extremely well (he once ran a jazz club in Tokyo), are fascinating to me, and they make his characters appealing and endearing, from my standpoint. I’m a huge jazz fan myself. I would never want Murakami to feature Japanese culture in a way that would Orientalize or exoticize his own country. Nor would I want to see Murakami respond in an extremely nationalistic and negative way to Westernization, in the manner of Yukio Mishima, for instance, perhaps the other best known Japanese novelist of the last three generations.

Maybe that’s part of why Murakami has immersed himself so deeply in Western culture, as an antidote to his country’s militaristic nationalism and to the conformist culture of the “salaryman” that has dug so deeply into Japanese life. But I can’t help but wonder why Murakami sees no precedents for his own rebellion within Japanese literary and artistic culture. What of the great poet Yosano Akiko, for instance, who defied expectations that she would continue to run the family business and fled to Tokyo from a provincial town in order to elope with her lover, the poet Yosano Tekkan? She was also a foe of the status quo. What of the poets of the Arechi or Waste Land movement in post-World War II Japanese poetry, such as the wonderful Tamura Ryuichi? Why doesn’t Murakami see his legacy through these and other Japanese writers? Has he become infatuated with the culture of the U.S.A. to the point where he can no longer see the strengths of his country’s own legacy?

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
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
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka