To even those fingers trained to the heights of word-spewing ability, the problem of the blank page remains intractable. The prescriptions of automatic writing (from the involuntary irruptions of John Dee’s Enochian, on through the spiritualist party trick) aim to remove the block by lowering it— quite literally by encouraging one to allow anything to emerge that stands near enough the surface to make a sentence.
As method for racking up the word count, automatic writing is so effective Sigmund Freud leveraged it for analysand’s spoken word and renamed it “free association.” Freud allegedly encountered the technique of automatic writing through the article “How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days,” a brief essay written in 1823 that takes on an ironic sheen when one considers the etymological drift of the word “original” over the course of the Industrial Revolution.1
In free association, the abstention from formality, civility, conversational obligation, or even logic (along with the analyst sitting invisibly behind the analysand’s head) aims to compel throttled impulses to the surface in speech. Utterance without restraint, over time, works like an acid on inhibition,2 with the aim to dissolve away or channel around any preventative measures installed to keep one from saying what, for reasons to be examined, one “should not say.” Ever the optimist, William Gass (1924-2017) (a far better trephiner than I) lovingly cradles the possibility in this ambiguity: “We cannot be certain what part of the soul is speaking … every philosophical catastrophe is a literary opportunity.”3
Setting aside the question of whether unrestrained ventilation of the subconscious brings one closer to truth, excellence, or more “honest” expression, that such ventilation even be possible would seem to require that whatever organs of which one is unconscious be thoroughly capable of delivering. The careful auto-AA of Julia Cameron’s “Artist’s Way” certainly holds that raw deluge (by way of “morning pages”) has intrinsic value, if only as a by-product of a process that aims to encourage one to keep in the habit.4
As a practice, we are told that morning pages are designed to subvert and gently deluge with a word-torrent the inner critic, the “Censor”— the term used for the left side of the brain or the impulse to adjust, edit, or critique what is produced. This splitting is consistent with the popularization (& resulting distortion) of Roger W. Sperry’s work on brain function and the corpus callosum into a heuristic that conceives of the “creative mind” as an entity bifurcated into an “Creator” that generates and “Critic” that revises. These states are entirely exclusive, and one’s mind can only be in one mode at a time; in this context, automatic writing, free association, and morning pages engage solely with the accumulative force of generation.
Broadly, this Cartesian bullshit is not my experience of writing. One shapes as one advances and governs the path, or at least aims the machete. In composition (which is the closest word for it), it feels more like constructing a shape and filling it as one goes. By this I don’t mean to say that everything created is formalist or fits to a structure— I mean, one finds the method of advancement that suits the thing itself. Language doesn’t represent thought, it is thought; and the creations of one’s outpouring are the shapes of one’s thinking.
This habit of shaping is one frequented by the writer and journalist John McPhee (1931-), who uses as a form of outline, draft, and structure doodled diagrams of each piece. This comes closest to the kind of approach I think makes sense: to wander until one finds the right palace, then make oneself at home and begin setting up memories within.
One more thought, again from Gass: “The question is which of our intentions will be allowed to rule and regulate and direct the others: that is what is critical. It is a matter of the politics of desire, or, as Plato put it when he asked this question of the moral agent: what faculty of the soul is in control of the will?”
Translator & author of the translation post-script “The Art of Ignorance”: An Afterword to Ludwig Börne Leland de la Durantaye’s excellent parsing of the etymology of “original” is worth quoting at length:
In 1823 to say original was to say a great deal. The word “originality” first entered German (and English), however, long before 1823. It entered, in point of fact, as a sin—the only one which we can do nothing about: original sin. It was employed as a translation for the Vulgate’s “peccatum originale.” In the eighteenth century, the word struck out on its own—and had little success. To say someone was “an original” in the eighteenth century was to say, essentially, that he was crazy. It was applied to those who pretended to be better and wiser than those who came before them, those who lacked respect for past achievement. To say that someone was “an original” was to say that what was original about them was not to be envied.
The word, allegedly, entered the German lexicon with the sentiment of “involuntary check on an expression of an impulse” in 1876; lacking access to a decent institutional library I’ve ordered a hard copy of a source to further clarify this shift.
William Gass, Finding a Form
Stendahl’s prescription was “twenty lines a day, genius or not”; Harry Mathews’ 20 Lines a Day captures “But watch out: ‘fragmented, exciting’ mustn’t become an excuse for getting less done.”