Eight Primary Principles for Writing

[Excerpted from Chp. 3 of "Archetypes for Writers"]

(1) Writing Takes Place in the Subconscious

A little about the relationship between the conscious and subconscious minds

Some people view the subconscious as merely a dumping ground for stuff the conscious mind cannot or does not want to handle. Others consider that the subconscious only exists for people who have “problems.” They think that if you are healthy, your subconscious will just fall into line with your conscious mind. None of these ideas are true.

The subconscious actually operates – in everyone -- as an independent mind. It perceives, processes, and retains things that never enter the conscious mind at all.

We all have material in the subconscious. In fact, it is where nearly all our material is found, but it cannot gather itself together, emerge, and become part of a work of art unless the conscious mind allows it. If the conscious mind is not ready, there will be no reason for information contained in the subconscious to be absorbed into consciousness or permitted to emerge.

Because conscious objectives are often diametrically opposed to those of the subconscious, the conscious mind usually acts as a suppressor.

However, it is possible to move the conscious mind gradually towards taking the part of

conjurer and collaborator, rather than suppressor, asking for material from the subconscious rather than blocking it, and as a bridge for that material to pass into the linear, daytime world and find expression in a concrete product. This is part of what the Archetypes approach does.

One’s Own Writing

So, why do I say that one’s own writing takes place in the subconscious? Of course we can all write consciously. We can sit down to write a report or a letter to the editor and say what we think needs to be said. Obviously, I am talking about another kind of writing, aren’t I? I am talking about your writing. I’m talking about your subject, your characters, your story: what belongs to you and no one else. These all reside in your subconscious. They already exist and you already “know” them, but at the same time, you don’t know them, you may search for others to tell you how to find them, how to write the novel you want to write, how to tell your story. As Proust wrote in The Captive: “Every artist is a native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten . . . but remains all his life attuned to it.”

Part of the reason why people both know and don’t know their own subjects is the principle that you must find outside material to substantiate everything inside of you. We’ll discuss this momentarily. The other part of the reason is simply that it’s in your subconscious. Things can emerge from and disappear back into the subconscious, like ghosts.

There are several components of the archetypes approach that utilize the principle of subconscious jurisdiction over your writing, but the exercise that is intended most directly to teach the student how it works, in a kind of real-time way, is the “UoD” (or Universes of Discourse) exercise. This exercise requires you to watch “UoD movies” from a special movie list. Each of the movies on the list has two “universes of discourse” which work in a similar fashion as the conscious and subconscious. 

(2) Your Characters Already Exist Within You, But The Material Exists Outside of You

Your characters are already there inside of you but you don’t know them fully yet. Once you find an example outside of you of part of one of your characters, you’ll instantly recognize it as somehow yours, and the additional outside factual material will fill in and flesh out the character inside.

I could speculate why or how it is that people’s characters already exist in them, but it is not necessary. It may have to do with the psychological principle of internalization of parental and other forces on one as a child. This would explain how it is that our characters already exist in us but are not fully formed, since children may not yet discern all the details or nuances inherent in the actions of parents or caregivers, even while they deeply experience the effects of those actions on them. In this way, one’s characters are simply the people who had the most effect on one’s early life. And further, because as a child one only absorbed the archetypal outlines of these characters, it is the archetype itself that needs to be retrieved and filled in.

Whatever the reasons for why characters exist inside of us and are discoverable through archetype work, the fact has great consequences for writing and it is a major underlying premise of the archetype approach.

(3) Certain Activities Promote Your Writing

More than time spent writing, more than novel- or screen-writing classes, more than advice from established writers or editors, there is a certain set of activities, not apparently related to writing, that will enable your own writing to happen of its own accord.

As usual, these activities are challenging to do. The reason why is because the activities change your entire way of looking at things, yourself and your life, your entire way of relating, of living. It is a more powerful and empowering way to use yourself and your life, but the fact remains that if it is your writing that you want to do, these activities are essential.

What are they then? They are the components skills in this book.

(4) Story Arises Out of Character

As noted in the last chapter, character archetypes, when combined, form story archetypes. The story arises from the ways in which the character archetypes interact. Ultimately, this means that there are story archetypes, too, but these are found only through working with character archetypes.

It is possible to reach one’s own writing through other approaches. Students can benefit from studying characterization techniques, story structure, or Jungian-type archetypes. However, the archetypes for writers approach supplies a major missing link which is not addressed by these other techniques .

The archetypes for writers approach is a travel guide for the tangled woods of an intimate personal journey, a tool for training the dual mind, and a method of construction of that for which the hero’s journey and story structure provide blueprints: characters and stories.

(5) In order for you to write your own writing, there must be at least one other person who recognizes expressions of your own writing and wants you to do it.

That’s part of what I'm here for.

(6) You are naturally drawn to your subject matter and the process of finding and working with your subject matter is a healing and transforming process.

Learning to listen to your subconscious is part of this journey. When you do learn to listen to your subconscious, you’ll find that it will lead you. There are many barriers to doing this work. This method is designed to help you navigate around those barriers and learn to listen to your deep Self.

(7) One’s own writing is an expression of the Self and thus all work that enables one’s own writing must be to organize one’s daily life to enable Self-expression.

It is not merely about sitting down and writing. Whatever you do to enable the expression of your Self will enable your writing.

(8) Writing connects one with forces greater than oneself.

Writing is not only about getting in contact with your subconscious or deep Self; it is also about coordinating oneself with that which surrounds oneself. It means accepting and working with the world as it is. Human events and conditions are shaped by many things: the push and pull of collective and individual human desires, physical laws and forces, the force of life around us, personal and collective history, and so on. Ultimately, writing is about everything, not just human interactions. And ultimately, because writing focuses us on things both within and without ourselves, those things become incorporated into our work.

Because of this, writing is greater than any individual. While the self is not lost and selfish drives are not dissolved, the writing is for something other than self gain. Considerations of “the greater good” may or may not arise, but they must exist if the writing is to be anything more than merely personal and autobiographical – that is, if it is to become universal.

Writing & the Self

[The following is an excerpt from my book, "Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious," (Michael Weise Productions, 2007), available on Amazon.]

 

Writing & the Self

You can take me down
To show me your home
Not the place where you live
But the place where you belong.

Toad the Wet Sprocket (Glen Phillips), Something to Say¹

Every artist is a native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten . . .

but remains all his life somehow attuned to it.

Marcel Proust, The Captive²

Most people would acknowledge that there is a difference between one’s own writing and writing one does for someone or something else, between writing that comes from some deep core place in oneself and writing done for external purposes. One’s own writing is not dictated by some external requirement, form, or structure. It is dictated from within – yet with a special interplay between one’s internal world and the world outside. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Trust the spirit,

As sovereign nature does, to make the form;

For otherwise we only imprison spirit

And not embody. Inward evermore

To outward, -- so in life, and so in art.³

The Self

In order for writing to happen this way, from inward to outward, even where prompted by outside events, a process of dialogue and dictation must arise from somewhere inside, carrying some internal imperative. What is this place or thing? From where does the imperative arise? Probably the simplest way to identify this place or thing is just to call it “the Self.” One’s own writing arises simply from the Self. Or, put another way, it is the Self that engages in one’s own writing. Proust writes:

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.⁴

Although it is somewhat redundant to define one’s own writing as a central act of the Self, this step has important implications for a writing approach. That the Self exists must be a given. If we did not acknowledge that the Self exists, we’d have to make up something else that would be equivalent.

No matter what the ultimate source of the Self, whether God-created, a biological phenomenon, genetic, intrinsic, or paradoxically self-created, we must acknowledge that something exists that creates our will and our sense of who we are. While the Self may or may not be consciously “self-aware,” each of us nonetheless has a “sense of self” from which we operate. Only the Self can legitimately express or define itself. We certainly may define others, define what we think are other people’s selves, but the only one who can say what is so in each of us is our Self. Only you know what you feel, what you know, what you experience. No one else can define this but you.

Expression of the Self

Your Self may only be able to define itself by the act of Self-expression. In other words, any act of self-definition is an act of Self-expression and any act of self-expression is an act of Self-definition. Only by self-expression can the Self realize itself. Silence or lack of expression is not Self-realization. Realization requires an act.

The Self must therefore be allowed the freedom to engage in expression in order to realize itself. Because the Self is realized by fulfilling its own chosen structure or form, any externally imposed structure or form, any external restriction, limitation, or requirement will necessarily exclude some part of the Self.

The purpose of the archetype approach in this book is to arrange things both internally and externally in such a way that the Self may engage in Self-expression and definition. That is what archetype work is about. For, while the Self will constantly attempt to express itself through whatever means it finds, if there is no way to capture and make concrete its expressions, they will dissipate and be absorbed into the outside world of other possibilities.

     Archetype work is not about imposing character or story archetypes onto your psyche. It is about helping your subconscious to articulate the archetypes that are already contained in it. 

     This definition of one’s own writing as the ultimate expression of the Self is the difference between the approach in this book to one’s own writing and other approaches to writing. It is not that other approaches do not or cannot “work,” whatever one means by that. It is simply that the archetypes approach is wholly grounded on the concept of the expression and realization of the Self.

The Elusive Self

However, even so, any approach depends on the diligence of application of the practitioner. You must continuously do the work. Furthermore, the Self is elusive and unquantifiable. The reason for its elusiveness is the same as the reason that the Self does not find automatic expression in the world, the same reason that there is an inherent struggle for each and every Self to express its core being: the vast world is not arranged in its sole service. Each of us has good reason for why we hide our Self behind masks and smoke screens. It is a dangerous world out there. There is no automatic ground staked out just for the realization of you and your Self. The task, thus, of realizing the Self belongs exclusively to the Self. As Proust wrote:

As for the inner book of unknown symbols . . . if I tried to read them[,] no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us.⁵

There is yet another reason for the elusiveness of the Self that plays into this equation: the Self largely functions in the subconscious.⁶ This fact has an enormous consequence for writing. Let me pose a string of suppositions to which I must ask your temporary indulgence in order to make a difficult point: because one’s own writing comes from one’s Self and the Self resides in the subconscious, if I, the teacher, am to reach your Self to enable writing, I must speak directly to that Self, which means speaking to the subconscious.

I have found this to be the case. Now, it may be true that in order to reach the Self, one does not need to speak directly to it. Perhaps one can reach the Self by other means. Let me simply say that in my twenty years of experience teaching this approach, and over forty years using and talking about it, I have never found a way to reach the writing Self without speaking directly to it, which means speaking to the subconscious. 

[Speaking to the subconscious - see future posts.]

1 Copyright 1991 Wet Sprocket Songs (Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.)

2 Marcel Proust, The Captive (Vintage, 1971) 347-8.

3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 5:224-8. Spelling modified.

4 Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured (Vintage, 1971) 140.

5 Id. at 139.

6 This book cannot be and is not intended to be a treatise on the complex inner workings of the mind. For purposes of the archetypes approach, sufficient evidence of these workings is found in a few central works upon which I rely and which I discuss in Chapter Eight of my book, "Archetypes for Writers." I reach no further into the subject than that which is needed to clarify certain aspects of this approach.

THE JOURNEY AND SORROW OF WRITING

Posted originally on my Red Room blog.

THE JOURNEY AND SORROW OF WRITING

by Jennifer Van Bergen

January 1, 2009, 4:14 pm

One night in my tiny NYC apartment, a friend told me the story of his older brother's death. Feeling not only sympathy for my friend's loss but admiration for the power of his telling, I thought "He's a writer." 

Later, when he showed me his poetry, published in Pakistan (his native land), I spoke the words I had thought. He responded, "No, if I thought of myself as a writer, I'd probably never write again."

A few years after this, my older daughter, age 15, wrote a novel. Although I was naturally proud of her and encouraged her to continue writing, she refused, saying that she had to be depressed to write.

Another friend told me she couldn't ever be a writer because she couldn't write dialogue. 

Twenty-six years ago, I stumbled upon the subject that I wanted to write my novel about. Although I wrote fiction and poetry voluminously up to that point in my life and although I have since written hundreds of articles and published two books (both nonfiction), I have not written a word of fiction since that day in 1982. 

I'd like to think of these reasons not to write as voyages we take in order to arrive at our writing. I think of them as the Odyssey: the 20-year journey Odysseus took in order to find his way back home and tell his story.

On the one hand, this is a truth I know deeply: that everything is really the journey to one's writing. On the other hand, I feel a terrible burden and sorrow about it. I would have liked to have lived life more freely, rather than bound permanently by an invisible umbilical cord to a ever-unborn manuscript.

I wonder if I'm a masochist or a habitual victim. Do I just like suffering? Couldn't I have found other ways to satisfy my need for accomplishment, fulfillment, or immortality? (Or maybe it's revenge? Revenge against those who'd like to suppress me, those who don't believe me, or against the heavens that laugh at my ambition?)

Immortality? Ambition? Yes ... although you will never see me compete with anyone. I will never take any honor out of the hands of another person, never diminish or try to steal another person's achievements or moment in the spotlight. I don't need to. I don't want what anybody else wants. Or perhaps I choose not to want what anyone else wants, so I can't lose anything. But, if that's my Fail-safe, it's not a very good one, because I have ended up feeling the need to achieve more than anyone else I know. I gave up wanting fame and fortune in this life and opted instead for posterity and eternity. 

To some extent, this was not the way I planned things to go; it was what was dealt me. Writing is, for me, both a way to tell the truth and a way to fill a giant hole in my life. It's a way of being loved ... and the trouble is, the things that make most people feel appreciated, successful, or ... loved ... just don't do it for me.

Yet another barrier for me is that because so much was destroyed in my life, I became an expert at finding the way through dangerous forests and thus became a guide for others. There is no inner conflict for me: the trouble lies in others' expectations. Guides may never express sorrows about their own journeys. They can no longer tell their own stories.

But what better example is there but the doing itself?  

Archetype Carriers

You don't understand why, but you always seem to attract the worst people in your life. You were abused as a child and it seems like there's no way out for you. Abusive people just follow you around.

Your friends and your therapist tell you "Think positive!" So, you think "Okay, this time he's going to be someone who respects me, loves me, takes care of me." You don't anticipate bad things. You look for the good. 

When the first incident happens, you ask yourself what you did to cause it. You know you must have done something. Your friends say you should look at yourself and not blame others.

But nothing fixes the problem.

This person is enacting the victim archetype. Along with the victim archetype, she is "carrying" the perpetrator archetype. In this particular combination, it's easy to see the pair: where there's a victim, there's an abuser/perpetrator. But even in this case, it is not easy to find the point of origin, to see where the dance begins. And in most other archetype pairs, it is not as easy to identify the pair.

Despite the fact that victim and abuser are on opposite poles, archetypes pairs are not opposites, per se. They are simply tongue and groove. They fit together.

Can you think of any examples from you life? (Post in comments.)

Arkhelogy Institute

Recently, I was told about the Summerhill School, where kids and adults work together to create the curriculum. Kids are not required to attend classes at all, if they don't want to, and can spend all their days playing. Rather an unusual and interesting concept, I thought. I wish I had known about it when my kids were little, because I really got a lot of criticism for taking them out of school and home-schooling them.

In any event, can the Summerhill School be a model for an Arkhelogy Institute? Possibly. The idea of self-constructed learning is close to my heart and beliefs. However, arkhelogy -- "working at the archetypal level" -- is a specific discipline. It "happens" naturally under the right conditions, but those conditions must exist in the environment first.

The question, then, is how can that environment be created so that people can come into it and immerse themselves in it?

Any ideas? Post them here. Anyone whose ideas I decide to adopt will get one free private session with me. :-)

Why YOU Should Become an Arkhelogian!

What is Arkhelogy?

Arkhelogy is the innate human ability to discern the patterns of human behavior that make up what Jung called archetypes. It is a kind of second sight, an ability to see further into people than society today requires or even allows us to see.

Arkhelogy is a word adapted from the obsolete English word archelogy, which Webster's defines as: Ar*chel"o*gy\, n. [Gr. ? an element or first principle + -logy.] The science of, or a treatise on, first principles. --Fleming.

Many readers will be familiar with the Jungian definition of archetypes. The American Heritage Dictionary: "In Jungian psychology, an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious." According to the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT), "people go through life drawing from a repertoire of instinctive roles: father, mother, child, lover, creator, warrior, caregiver, and an untold number of others." CAPT offers a test of 12 different archetypes: Lover, Warrior, Innocent, Orphan, Caregiver, Destroyer, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Sage, Seeker, and Jester.

However, in arkhelogy, we do not rely on pre-defined, cookie-cutter archetypes. We discover the archetypes from the root up, in the context of their origins inside of us.

That arkhelogy is a skill, not just the superimposition of types, was one of my major discoveries and is an incredibly important fact. It means that the skill, while inherent, can be developed and taught.

Why Should You Become an Arkhelogian?

Aside from being able to impress your friends by telling them, "I'm an Arkhelogian!" and having them respond "You're a WHAT?" (or be afraid to ask), being an arkhelogian will bring you great rewards.

Will you publish a best-selling novel or sell the movie rights for a huge sum? Will you become a celebrity? I don't know.

What I do know is that you will start to see the world differently. You will see MORE. You will see what I call "the secret lives" of people. And when you get really good at arkhelogy, you will begin to discern "the invisible world" they live and move in -- the world where all the action really takes place.

On top of this, you will gradually develop your Author Self. This is not just the part of you that does the writing. It is a unique and rare thing -- and really quite amazing, because the Author Self already knows the beginning, the middle, and the end of all of your stories! That's all the stories that you carry inside of you and the lives of all your characters. These are not just those that you would imagine or make up, but the ones that actually live inside of you: the ones that, in every sense, are you.

And if you think about that for a moment, you will realize that what that means is that you will, in a sense, transcend linear time, as we know it. The lives and destinies of your characters (who, after all, are just the people in your life who are in a special relation to you) will be known to you.

It's a tremendous power to have. That's why you should become an Arkhelogian.