Intuitive Writing

Serendipity? Not long after I wrote my last post, Terri Windling posted an eloquent testament to the intuitive approach to creating art – visual, narrative, poetic. (If you'e not seen it, jump over there for a wealth of insight and inspiration. Trust me, it's rich.) That discussion has inspired me to reflect a bit more on the theme.

I remember a time when I felt guilty, actually guilty, that I wasn’t “doing my homework” when I wrote stories. I’d been told to plan out my stories in advance, write outlines, give my characters little biographies, work up a complex portrait of scene and society. All that before you write – so I’d been told. This advice came via all sorts of channels, mostly writing guides. But it also seemed to be what one my literary heroes, Dostoevsky, did – as far as I could tell from reading the introductory articles to his works. (I now think his approach was more intuitive than I then supposed.)

Still, I persisted in being “lazy,” jumping into my stories with almost no idea what would happen, hardly a clear idea of who was who, and at most a vague sense of where the story might go. All I knew was a dilemma or an idea, a concept of some kind. My excuse was that I didn’t have time to do all that other work. That if I did that, I’d never get a chance to write the story, explore the idea. But the deeper reason was that I just didn’t want to do it. It evoked from me a deep, internal “uggh.”

Only slowly have I come to see that this is not a bad thing. As I mentioned in my last post, I came across the other sort of advice later in my apprenticeship. I’ve eavesdropped on artists I admire, and found out they do what I do – that they loathe the notion of planning all this out in advance. That it empties the work of its joy, and saps the potential of the story itself, or their creative process. So I gave up that guilt and just started writing.

And then something happened. I had a novel that I’d rewritten a couple of times, and on the last rewrite a character had emerged out of the woodwork into the story and, despite almost no presence on the page, had played a vital role in its unfolding. And one night, though I can’t swear it kept me up, she nagged at me. She wanted me to tell her story. I thought, “This is silly. It doesn’t make sense to write the story of a minor character in an unrevised novel.” But … well, she kept nagging, in an intriguing sort of way. So, to appease her, I jotted down some four or five lines, sketching out what I knew about her and what I didn’t. It turned out that I knew quite a bit more than I suspected, but I put it aside, still thinking it was foolish to obey this impulse.

Then, a few days later, I opened up that little document, about as close to an outline as I’d ever gotten, and I wrote about two paragraphs in her voice, coming from the point in the story where she awakened from her own hardship into hope. And that cracked open my resistance. The whole story was there. It was simply a matter of finding out how we got to that tangled knot, and how it would untangle for her.

I wrote it, thinking it was awful. I almost gave up, then went back and glanced over some earlier pages – realized it wasn’t awful. After that, I wrote it with fear that I would destroy what had begun. And then gradually I just gave up my fear and prejudice and reservations, and I wrote her story with a kind of astonished, listening ear.

If any of my novels makes its way before you, I hope it’s this one. Later this summer I plan to send out her story. But if no one notices her, at least I did. And I feel a kind of awe and pride in having done so.

Like this? Come see my new blog, Fairy Spell.

Fantasy - according to Terri Windling

Terri Windling once gave a speech in which she laid out two realms of fantasy produced in the twentieth century:

those rooted in the grand themes, symbols, and language of myth, epic, and romance, and those rooted in the humbler stuff of folklore and fairy tales. The first category includes tales epic in scope, full of sweeping heroic adventures and battles on which the fate of worlds, or at least kingdoms, depend. The latter category includes much smaller tales, more intimate in nature — stories of individual rites of passage and personal transformation.

These two realms of fantasy, in turn, hark back to two very different ancient story-telling traditions. The epic kind, as she mentions, grows out of the court—the elite circles in which men of power and substance (or their supporters) passed down authoritative accounts of the world. Some of these epics can be quite profound meditations on the meaning of human existence, the struggle against corruption and overwhelming evil, or just the existential question of life’s meaning in the face of death. Think of Homer and Beowulf. Battle scenes are important to epic, partly because the story of struggle against evil foes is one way political regimes justify power. Romance, too, of the chivalrous kind, concerns men (and their consorts) in the aureate glow of the king and his court.

Windling’s second category harks back to a separate tradition of storytelling. As she puts it, “The oral folk tale tradition, on the other hand, was a peasant tradition, and a largely female one.” That peasant tradition, then, is less likely to be about the rise and fall of great empires, than to be about the rise and fall of a sharp-tongued girl, a submissive daughter, or an uppity son. Storytellers in this folk tradition work on themes that are no less hair-raising, no less pregnant with magic and evil. They’re simply for a different audience.

In some ways, in fact, the magic in the “peasant tradition” can be more unexpected and, therefore, more terrifying, more grim—maybe even more potent.

Modern fantasy novels generally take their departure, says Windling, from one or the other tradition. They can depart far from that tradition, of course, and individual writers can work in both mediums. There are no doubt instances where the two seem to merge. Literature rarely holds to type.

But Windling’s observations are worth bearing in mind. They offer a helpful corrective to thinking of “fantasy” as inevitably in the epic mode. Effective fantasy can thrive without battles, drawn swords or sieges on towns--with none of the machinery of war. It can have small people, girls and boys or peasants or herb-swilling old women … caught up in smaller tensions of magic or finding escape through it. And it can surprise us with its human insights along the way.