Don't be talkin' about your subconscious like you know it!

In my last post, I talked about how you can be too conscious as a writer--how over-consciousness can almost be deconstructive. From my own experience, the best writing comes when you're in a state-of-mind where you are hardly even thinking about what you're saying. I like to think about this as the unconscious stage.

The unconscious stage is a state of hyper focus in which you create brilliant words with little evidence of understanding the process. You can't think in this mode. Only write. Trust that your subconscious brain knows what it's doing, because it just might.

After writing something in this stage, you may even be incapable of explaining or discussing what you wrote with anyone else. If you try to, you could end up sounding like you weren't the one who wrote the piece. You could completely ruin the story for your readers.


Here is an example scenario of this:

Unconscious Writer: This story is about a jockey and a horse.

Someone: Yes. The intimate relationship between man and beast.

Someone else: Yes, yes. A man's spiritual merger with a horse.

Someone: I cried when they finally became a centaur.

Someone else: Me too! A centaur, but with a horse's head and human body. An inverted centaur...

Unconscious Writer: Actually, the story is more straightforward than that. I wrote this story because I was watching a horse race and began to feel bad for horses. We always ride them but never let them ride us. Why don't humans ever wear the saddle?

Someone: So the story is about a jockey literally wearing a saddle?

Unconscious Writer: Yeah. The man and the horse don't merge. The horse hurts his leg in the middle of the race and so the jockey puts the saddle on and carries him to the finish line.

Someone else: Really? I thought it was so much deeper than that.

Someone: Horses can weigh like thousands of pounds. Jockeys weigh like a 100 pounds. This story is not plausible at all.

Unconscious Writer: Um... I realize that... and that's why they have to merge into a centaur to finish the race!



Do not make the mistake of trying to understand your story or the even bigger mistake of trying to explain it to others.

When you produce something in the unconscious stage, you really aren't the author. Subconscious forces that only Freud could understand wrote your words. It's psychology. It's science. It's unconscious. It's Freud. Maybe he wrote it.  It doesn't matter. All that does matter is that you must avoid trying to explain what you write to anyone. The text only exists in the mind of the reader, so let them figure out/fabricate the true meaning of your story.