There’s a brilliant explanation of the act of creating fiction here, on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. I just love this post, and I found the following particularly resonant:
To me, there’s nothing more pleasurable than writing. There’s nothing more insanely beautiful than sitting down to write–either longhand or on the computer–and finding that your fingers are out-running your brain. To be so inspired that you’re not thinking as you write, that you’re just the vessel, the receptacle, for the words, which are pouring out as if they were your life’s blood.
This reminded me a great deal of The Dark Tower which, towards the end of the series, becomes less and less about Roland’s quest and more about the very act of writing and creating itself. It seems to explore the idea that when you imagine, in some ways you are creating a new reality. I was reminded of Stephen King’s character in the book, who seems to channel the spirit of Roland’s universe and commit it to the page without any knowledge of where the ideas come from. He is almost unaware of the act itself. The following reminded me of King’s descriptions of the Beam, which in the books represents a higher power almost beyond our comprehension:
It’s like… something flowing up and through me, which whether it is from me or something greater than me, imbues me (and the writing) with the same feeling.
I’d imagine not many writers can articulate exactly where their ideas come from. I know the ideas that I find the easiest to convey are usually the ones that just jump into my head out of nowhere. Certainly most stories seem to have a life of their own, and once you have set them on their path, you can (hopefully) watch them go. Someone famous said something similar about sculpting, and seeing images in the clay, but I can’t remember who. I think that’s how it feels when you hit on an idea you truly love.
This relates to a yogic concept (you see… I had to get the yoga in there somehow!), one of the eight limbs of yoga, known as Dhyana. This state was described to me as the state in which you stop concentrating on your object of focus, and start engaging with it effortlessly, almost without thought or awareness. This doesn’t just relate to mediation; it’s the state you enter whenever you are fully absorbed in an activity, and the outside world simply fades away. I think this is probably the same state Jeff VanderMeer is talking about in the quote above. As he goes on to say:
It’s about the point at which you stop thinking and you’re channelling something through your fingers and you almost don’t know how you got to that point.
I agree that it’s this state that makes the hard slog so worth while. It’s what keeps me writing even though, at present, I’m doing so without an agent or publisher.
