The Creative Writer's Mind

Nigel Krauth

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781800415379
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What goes on in creative writers' heads when they write? What can cognitive psychology, neuroscience, literary studies and previous research in creative writing studies tell creative writers about the processes of their writing mind?

Creative writers have for centuries undertaken cognitive research. Some described cognition in vivid exegetical essays, but most investigated the mind in creative writing itself, in descriptions of the thinking of characters in fiction, poetry and plays. The inner voicings and inner visualising revealed in Greek choruses, in soliloquies, in stream-of-consciousness narratives are creative writers' 'research results' from studying their own cognition, and the thinking of others. The Creative Writer's Mind is a book for creative writers: it sets out to cross the gap between creative writing and science, between the creative arts and cognitive research.

1 Depictions of the Creative Writing Mind

Interpreting the massive project of exploring the human mind by depicting character thinking and behaviour occupies many, many pages of literary criticism. There is not time here to canvass all that work. Essentially, the project was started in the West in ancient Greek drama and lyric poetry, and its development led – via many traditions, movements and genres of writing – through medieval and Elizabethan traditions of self-reflection, through Romantic meta-thinking and the emergence of the psychological novel, ultimately to filmscripts such as Memento and Inception and experimental multimodal works published electronically today. In all this creative writing, mental anguish over moral choice has been a key generator of the literary product; the mind-work of characters has driven action, plot and theme. To see how creative writers have dealt with the changing sensibilities and technologies available to them in the quest to describe the mind in action, we can look fleetingly at just one strand of the project: performance. In order to examine the mind in conflict, the ancient playwrights created a device – the Chorus – to evoke the workings of characters’ minds and interpret them for the audience. By Shakespeare’s time, the soliloquy was the preferred way to describe thinking on the stage. Today, technology can produce graphic depictions of the mind in the theatre and on film. Throughout the project’s entire history, however, I dare say that the most efficient way for the mind-investigating writer to track decision-making and perception, has been in poetry and prose, particularly in creative works that utilise internal monologue and first-person narrative techniques.

But the widely acknowledged legitimacy of the creative writer as researcher of the mind lost traction over time as philosophers developed more systematic approaches. In the 19th century, modern psychology emerged to challenge philosophy of mind, and by the mid-20th century there was a specialised branch of science – cognitive psychology – given over to the experimental study of the mind. Nowadays, the influence of neuroscience impacts the field. While the mind has been portrayed in many ways – poetically, philosophically and scientifically – the following provides a brief history of depictions relevant to creative writing.

Muses

In the absence of better knowledge about how the mind worked, ancient creatives turned to the poetic concept of the Muse to explain inspiration and the creative process. Traditionally in western culture, nine Greek muses embodied the arts. Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, Clio the muse of history, Terpsichore the muse of dance, and so on. At the very beginning of western creative writing (although it was in the form of oral tradition back then) Homer called on muses to assist with his work. The first words of the Iliad (c. 800 BCE) – Aειδε θεὰ – are the exhortation, ‘Sing, O Goddess’ (Homer, 1888: 9), an address to a muse of song and creative composition, probably ‘Calliope… the goddess of poetic inspiration’ (Nagy, 2018), urging her to participate in the creation of the work. Following Homer, Greek poet Hesiod in his ‘Hymn to the Muses’ (c. 700 BCE) acknowledged: ‘Happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his lips’ (Hesiod, 2019). In the earliest oral storytelling and writing in western culture, it was accepted that creativity was muse-inspired, and that the makers of the best stories had minds that were divinity-assisted.

Arguments about the workings of the creative writer’s mind started when Plato quoted Socrates in the Phaedrus and Ion dialogues (c. 370–390 BCE):

[A] poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer with him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry… (Plato, 2001: 41)

This early theorising of creative production suggested that creative writing, seen as the dictation by a supernatural visitant to the mind of the writer, involved a necessary loss of rational control. In order to write creatively (as Plato’s words indicate, without allowing them to be said with irony) the creative writer must feel possessed, hear voices, be unable to control the experience by intellect, and must copy down what the sweet voices say in their hijacked head. According to Plato in the Phaedrus, this was a madness like the madness of having prophetic visions, or being transported by ritual drunkenness, or being crazily in love (Plato, n.d.: 113).

The dispute this theory caused, from Plato through to the 19th century, is traced by M.H. Abrams in his book, The Mirror and the Lamp (Abrams, 1971: 189–193). Here I pick out some of the highlights. As part of the debate, the astute Roman poet, Horace (65–8 BCE), went against Plato and saw art not as the product of madness but as ‘a purposeful procedure, in which the end is foreseen from the beginning, part is fitted to part, and the whole is adapted to the anticipated effect upon the reader’ (Abrams, 1971: 164). Shakespeare (1564–1616), a highly perceptive realist, too, called for a ramped-up ‘Muse of fire’ in his analysis of how writing for theatrical performance worked (Henry V, Prologue, c.1599): the ‘purposeful procedure’ he attributed to the muse was based in the effects the words of his scripts, combined with Elizabethan theatre architecture, had on the imaginative capabilities of his audiences’ minds. In 1674, critic René Rapin (1621–1687) acknowledged the pervasiveness of the idea of the Muse in writing, and questioned the classical theory, but also had an each-way bet on it:

‘Tis in no wise true, what most believe, That some little mixture of Madness goes to make up the character of a Poet; for though his Discourse ought in some manner to resemble that of one inspir’d: yet his mind must always be serene, that he may discern when to let his Muse run mad, and when to govern his Transports. (Rapin, 1674: 6; italics in original)

Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley opted for the Muse idea in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (written in 1821). ‘Poetry is indeed something divine,’ he said, and questioned ‘whether it be not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study’ (Shelley, 2001 [1840]: 713). Citing Milton’s claim that the Muse ‘dictated’ to him the ‘unpremeditated song’ of Paradise Lost, Shelley likened writing to the plastic and pictorial arts:

Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting… a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb, and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. (Shelley, 2001: 714)

Shelley proposed that after an occasion of divine visitation, the writing mind then spends time translating the gifted message into communicable language. Thus the mind, inspired from outside, does an editing job. William Wordsworth had earlier suggested the same thing in his poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1807) where he recounted that, after going for a walk, and while lying on his couch back home ‘in pensive mood’, the cosmic significance of the inspired moments when he saw the host of daffodils became clear to him, and at the same time became the subject of writing. Wordsworth analysed the writing process by saying that when he first saw the daffodils:

I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought…

(Wordsworth, 2002 [1807]: lines 17–18)

But then he completed his analysis of the process:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

(Wordsworth 2002 [1807]: lines 19–24)

Wordsworth’s study of the writer’s mind is highly useful for creative writers. It teased out how the ‘inward eye’ of visual consciousness reviews and reassesses the worldly experience of seeing. The poetic ‘wealth’ (line 18) of the experience is not necessarily fully recognised at the time of physical sighting but, with further mind-work done in solitude, significances for writing become clearer.

Wordsworth confirmed (in this poem and elsewhere in his oeuvre) that the role of the writer’s mind was to process information gathered from the real world and turn it into writing, and he showed how he did it in practical terms – by walking and by lying down. A necessary part of that process, where the mind operates on its own with ‘the bliss of solitude’, involves thinking things through (‘in pensive mood’), which engages cognitive visual re-enactment (‘They flash upon that inward eye’) and the re-creation of emotional experience (‘then my heart… dances’). These mental inputs trigger the writing of the poem – its shape, movement and feel. For Wordsworth, the muse is Nature, and the dance with the muse is done while he rests on his couch in pre-writing and planning mode. In this poem, Wordsworth lays down the role of the creative writer’s mind, which is: to find the significance of personal experience; to find its relationship to the rest of the world; and to find the structures whereby the experience might be delivered as writing.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, our understanding of how and why we write – and the mind’s involvement in that process – continues to evoke the muse explanation, although the muse is now a down-to-earth concept among serious thinkers, having nothing to do with the divine. Of muses for men, Germaine Greer says:

A muse is anything but a paid model. The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind. (Greer, 2008: np)

There is a good dose of well-grounded irony in Greer’s statement. Writers like William S. Burroughs and Ray Bradbury have also used the muse idea ironically; Burroughs said: ‘Cheat your landlord if you can – and must – but do not try to short change the Muse’ (Burroughs, 2012: 10). Bradbury, in a more developed personal analysis, said: ‘The Muse… is that most terrified of all the virgins. She starts if she hears a sound, pales if you ask her questions, spins and vanishes if you disturb her dress’ (Bradbury, 1996: 31). Bradbury continued:

Another way of describing The Muse might be to reassess those little specks of light, those airy bubbles which float across everyone’s vision, minute flaws in the lens or the outer, transparent skin of the eye. Unnoticed for years, when you first focus your attention on them, they can become unbearable nuisances, ruptures in one’s attention at all hours of the day. They spoil what you are looking at, by getting in the way. People have gone to psychiatrists with the problem of “specks”. The inevitable advice: ignore them, and they’ll go away. The fact is, they don’t go away; they remain, but we focus out beyond them, on the world and the world’s ever-changing objects, as we should. So, too, with our Muse. If we focus beyond her, she regains her poise, and stands out of the way. (Bradbury, 1996: 32)

Bradbury’s account suggests the muse is something to be avoided – seemingly a necessary, though poorly understood, part of the creative writing process, but essentially a hindrance. Female writers have taken a different tack, keen to reclaim a more intimate relationship between the creative writer and their process. Maya Angelou said: ‘When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll come”’ (Angelou, quoted in Brunner, 2015). Isabel Allende (2013) advised: ‘Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up’ (Allende, 2013: 6). I feel there is a lovely intimacy between women writers and their perceived muses, by which they mean the workings of their minds. It is very different from the idea that a male writer should become intimate with her, ‘his muse’. As a male, I much prefer the idea that I become intimate with a part of myself, my own mind, in the creative process.

Clearly there have always been complications in the relationship between the writer and the concept of the muse. Today, much talk about the writing process goes on in the media and in popular conversation, which still reflects a mythologising of the creative writing process due to an absence of more convincing published knowledge. The advent of the technological and digital ages has not dislodged from popular belief the concept of the muse as responsible for creative practice, nor has it erased from serious writerly discourse the use of the muse-concept as metaphor. Most recently, a trademarked ‘Muse’ is available as ‘a wearable brain-sensing headband. It measures your brain’s activity using EEG (Electroencephalography) sensors’ (Dodd, n.d.). You can buy it cheap on Amazon. The idea persists that a modicum of supernatural afflatus is involved in all creative mind processes.

Readers who appear to accept the muse explanation for creative writing do not, in my view, easily sense the experience the creative writer goes through. They examine the literary product as text and interpret its production in readerly ways according to societal and cultural expectation, media influence, normative education, literary archetypes and literary critical theory. If they are innocently amazed by the skills of masterful others, they reach for an easy ‘Muse’ explanation. Writers continue to fuel this convenient set of understandings. The muse explanation for creative work lends a mythic, quasi-historical quality to a reader’s reading. Readers interested in reading per se are less likely to be interested in the actual cognitive or synaptic detail of what goes on in the writer’s brain – they want something more dramatic and inspiring. After all, they fork out money to buy these expensive books! I think creative writing in the digital age is due for a proper demystification, even though it means wiping off some of that glamour, that fairy dust, which places the author on such a dubious pedestal.

Sciences

Until the 20th century, science allowed little status to studies of the mind and left it to philosophy and literature to deal with. While the mind could not be accessed and observed with methodological precision, non-scientific concepts of mind persisted. What was really needed for understanding creativity from the scientific viewpoint, was a breakthrough which allowed observation, with methodological certainty, of the working of the creative mind.

In the late 19th century, research in psychology made significant advances. William James, the recognised ‘father of American psychology’, proposed in his major work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), the concept of ‘the Stream of Thought’. This involved, he claimed, his ‘study of the mind from within’ (James, W., 2019 [1890]: 224). His contemporary, the pioneering experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, famously debunked James’ ground-breaking book, saying: ‘It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology’ (Wundt, quoted in Steffens, 1931: 150). James undoubtedly undertook laboratory research – but he seems not to have been as masterful at it as was Wundt. However, James’ individual thinking about stream of consciousness, and its associated depiction of convergent and divergent thinking, was highly influential in the early quarter of the 20th century, and it remains so today for scientists and writers alike. In 1880, delivering a lecture to the Harvard Natural History Society about ‘the highest order of minds’, James said:

Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law. According to the idiosyncrasy of the individual, the scintillations will have one character or another. They will be sallies of wit and humor; they will be flashes of poetry and eloquence; they will be constructions of dramatic fiction or of mechanical devices, logical or philosophic abstractions, business projec...