By Helen Borel
WRITER'S MIND: RARE BLEND OF LOGIC AND INVENTION
Honoring and Using Your Creative Process Both complexity and simplicity characterize the writing process. Which is simple because a born writer is incapable of not writing. A born writer must write as we all must breathe air. Too, writing is complex because the creative process includes both right-cerebral and left-cerebral activities. It demands the planning, organization and logic which the left brain directs. Concomitantly, it must incorporate the primary process of dreaming, hallucinations, poetry and evanescent unexplainable essences which the right brain captures.
Uniqueness of the Writer's Mind Thus, the writer - as are other creative beings - is unique in the ways she/he uses the brain and its many features. Ordinary individuals (by which I refer to those who are certain they lack creativity, or those who are scared to discover they are creative - the latter that I believe most persons, if honest with themselves, can identify with) tend to be attached to left cerebral thought processes; mathematical, reliable, logical, never out-of-the-box concepts here.
Therefore, I'm positive, that most individuals utilize only fifty percent of their brain power, if that. The only time such left-brainers may get to experience right brain activity is involuntarily, either while dreaming or if they ever become insane and "hear" voices or "see" visions. Such primary process thinking is characteristic of schizophrenia and emanates from the right cerebrum.
Engaged in the creative process, the writer is somehow enabled to dip down into the primary process - where psychosis lives - extract what objects, memories, cuckoo thoughts, and inventions are found there and return to real life (consciousness) without being wounded, too much, emotionally. This process is referred to, in psychoanalytic theory, as "regression in the service of the ego." How the artist makes this happen is still, mostly, a mystery.
The Creative Process is a Highly Focused State My experience with my writing process is that, while aware and conscious of everything happening around me, I relax and let myself become so focused on an idea and on the need to write about it, and on the essentiality of writing itself, that I seem to enter a sort of trance. While, at the same time, I am also easily aware of my surroundings, can answer a phone call, will develop side concepts unrelated to the focus at hand, and so forth. It is this highly focused state that allows the plunging down or dipping into my depths of Self by way of the primary process which lives in the right brain.
The natural-born writer somehow - no scientist or psychologist truly knows how and why the creative person's brain does this - manages to utilize both cerebri and their divergent functions separately, at first, when giving birth to a shiny new idea. Initially by allowing the right brain to do its thing with memory, imagination, poetic use of language and special applications of individual words, the writer creates a unique mixture. A dynamic substance which then sits ready, tremulously, to be attacked by the master Editor, the writer's left brain. The Logician.
If You Don't Like to Work Hard and Think Deeply, Forget About being a Writer If you are fantasizing about becoming a writer and you imagine this process is easy and painless, let me shock you into reality here and now: Immediately disabuse yourself of this notion! Writing is difficult. And the most difficult phase of the writing process is when Logic must be applied to render your creation worthy of publication.
This is the time when you are forced to perform surgery on your new baby. When you must excise, ruthlessly - oftentimes your very best ideas because they simply don't belong in the work at hand - no matter how beautiful the words, no matter how brilliant your inherent philosophy, out they must go.
Still, stay calm. Don't toss away those cut-out fragments. Place them in a "ticklers" file folder for future idea arousals to elaborate more fully on these "ideas," or to nudge you to get going on other projects.
My advice for writers, freelance or otherwise: Since, presumably, you love to write, you absolutely must do it every day to get the feel of how your dual brains work. Your creative process will not click on until you do it consistently and with regularity. Writing is organic. Nobody can "teach" it to you. You learn to do it better and better AS you do it.
Keep on doing it. You'll know by the feel of it when your writing project is as excellent as you can write it for the topic you've selected and for the target readership of the publication you have chosen for it.
After the Creative...Comes the Pain, the Editing And when you are ready to submit it to an editor or publisher, please don't send anything that you haven't thoroughly read over and over again for quality, grammar, originality, clarity, creativity, style and tightness. Nothing extraneous. Cut out unnecessary sentence-lengtheners. Remember the old adage: "Less is more."
Additionally, be surgical about typos and misspellings. Proofread several times to make sure your work is in high quality submission mode. Your editors will be most grateful and you will be proud of your writing. So, even if declined by one publication, your work will still be in perfect shape for submission elsewhere.
Lastly, during your struggles to develop your writing talent, remember this: Though the writing process may appear simple while being quite complex, it is exceptionally rewarding. Because nothing is more exhilarating than doing all day the precise kind of work that makes you happy.
© Copyright 2008-2015 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.
For permissions and rights, email me at: emotional_health@earthlink.net and type into the Subject line "WRITER'S MIND"
Because Creativity and Emotional Health are Related, you may wish to read my various articles on psychiatry and psychotherapy subjects. Feel free to visit My PsychoTherapy Zone at: PsychDocNYC.blogspot.com
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