Chapter 3
Finding a stance as a writer
I have chosen Simon's story as my first case study because he was the only male in Group 2 and I wanted to consider gender differences in the experience of change (although, as it turned out, there were no significant gender differences visible). 1 He was also one of only three students who took the personal rather than the professional development route through the programme (see Chapter 1) and I wanted to compare the impact of the different routes (see Chapter 11). His story demonstrates the shift from a troublesome imbalance between freedom and control in the creative process to a more flexible but simultaneously grounded and agentic stance for writing. Importantly this includes the emergence of challenging emotions in the creative writing and of an unruly part of the personality Simon calls his creative ‘writer self’, with which he begins to collaborate.
Problems in the writing process
Simon is almost 70 when he starts the MA. He has been trying to write novels in his spare time and identifies two main problems: that of choosing ‘the correct words [to] convey the image in my mind clearly without overwriting’, 2 and repeatedly getting bored with his writing projects. The latter is particularly troublesome: ‘Having started and written part of a story, I have a full image in my mind of how it should continue and end. I find the effort of continuing further less interesting than starting on a new idea’. What he likes best about writing is the excitement and novelty of finding out what is going to happen next: ‘I've got a grasshopper mind’, he says. Yet he'd also like to complete a novel and submit it to an agent or publisher, but: ‘I'm not sure what I have to do after I've written something and finished it to go through it and work it out’. This, he says, is because of his lack of knowledge of the crafting and structuring process. He also finds it difficult to judge his own writing and is confused by the very different reactions of different readers.
At first sight, then, Simon's problems with his writing appear to be a lack of knowledge of the craft, which any creative writing course, or studying ‘how-to’ books at home, might remedy. But Simon has chosen a personal development context for addressing these problems and this is not by chance:
I was more frustrated as a writer than I realised [… which …] I was only expressing subconsciously by joining the programme for a start, you know, and telling myself that I was doing it for entirely different reasons, from the need to write, you know, and I chose this programme with all the psychological stuff which I despise.
Simon has undertaken other arts courses, hoping that they will be ‘life-enhancing and mind-expanding experiences’, but has always been disappointed. So what exactly is he seeking? Looking beyond the craft element of Simon's writing problems, one could say that there is a conflict in his creative process between freedom and control: either he can give his writing total freedom, letting himself be seduced by the appeal of action with characters that are, in his words, ‘reactive’ at the surface level, which does not ultimately lead to a rounded story, or he can impose total control on the story by ‘pursuing a direct, pre-planned line’ that leads to boredom and abandoning the project for a new one. Neither of these approaches produces a workable novel, so the writing lapses: ‘I fail through lack of persistence’. Between the total freedom and total control of Simon's writing process, there is insufficient middle ground, and the metaphor ‘grasshopper mind’, with its connotation of leaping from one vantage point to another, captures this exactly. It creates a picture of thinking stuck in an either/or, resulting in writing that he finds frustratingly superficial. By joining the MA Simon is not only seeking to develop the craft of writing, but also, even if not fully consciously, a way of expanding and enhancing his cognitive processes.
Opening up space for the imagination through fictional dialogues
This latter begins to happen already in Course 1 (Writing for Personal Development). In response to the ‘Self as Source’ exercise (see Chapter 1) Simon creates two self-characters: Anselm, an explorer returning from the Arctic, who is angry and narcissistic, centrally concerned with bolstering his expansive persona; and Cyril, an airport official with ‘a deep need to be liked’, whose job is to deal with problem people like Anselm. Simon reports that this exercise ‘caused a terrific input, a blast of energy — writing, writing, writing’. The two characters emerged ‘alive and vibrant’ and by the end of the term he had written 50,000 words of a novel around them: ‘It feels as if I have been unable not to write. This was not so much an unblocking of writer's block as a removal of writer's boredom. The characters now engage me’. Identifying and drawing on aspects of his personality as a source for writing means that not only do his characters have more psychological depth and are therefore intrinsically more interesting to him, but at a deeper level there is also potential for the characters' engagement through the story to create an inner dialogue between different aspects of his personality.
Another kind of self-dialogue is triggered by the ‘imagined reader’ exercise. Simon finds this ‘unexpectedly difficult’, because he cannot conjure up an imagined reader: ‘there was no one there. I was writing for someone that I denied’. Confronted with this difficult insight, he is ‘unable to read … out aloud’ what he has written:
Well, it took me by surprise, I mean it was a class exercise, write in ten minutes, you know [the tutor] gave us the various circumstances, and I thought: ‘oh that's terrific’, and I wrote this stuff down and thought it was a hoot, you see, this guy, and then when I came to read it out I couldn't, I broke down in tears. I mean that's just extraordinary [see Chapter 12].
However, he does manage to create an imagined reader when he writes up the exercise at home: a ghost who visits the writer's room when the writer is away. In this first person piece (‘Ghost Writer’) the ghost describes the room as a bare, impoverished space. When he reads the manuscript lying on the table, he discovers that it is ‘meaningless scrawl’ interspersed with pictures torn from magazines. Nevertheless the ghost-reader wants to meet the writer and settles down to wait for his return. It is a very long wait; the room progressively deteriorates, the window loses its glass and the wind carries off the pages of the manuscript. When the writer eventually appears, he is old and worn: ‘his face grey, lined and sagging, his body stooped and halt, supported by a heavy wooden stick’. Clearly he has been through a harsh experience, yet he is unable to tell the ghost anything about it:
‘Where have you been?’ I said [the ghost is narrator].
‘Out’, he said.
‘Where did you go?’ I said.
‘Nowhere’, he said.
‘What have you been doing?’ I said.
‘Nothing’, he said.
It is striking that the writer here cannot talk about where he has been and what he has done. One explanation is that what he has experienced is just too terrible; another that, as with his writing, he has simply been wandering around in confusion. Either way, there is no meaningful dialogue between the writer and the reader. Yet a tentative relationship is established between these two textual selves in the writing process, even if only at the metaphorical level. As the ghost-reader follows the writer out of the room, he thinks that: ‘Maybe there was enough of time left for us’.
Structuring the space for the imagination
Simon's emotional opening-up to a more challenging and dialogic psyche triggered by the writing exercises is significantly supported by the relationship he develops with his Course 1 reading group (see Chapter 1). This is not without its challenges however: ‘faced with the prospect of reading to a group of strangers, I froze. I think that at that early stage I was unwilling to make any real commitment of myself in public’. Yet once he begins to trust them, he is able to drop his mask and to feel more comfortable about sharing his personal writing. He describes these fellow group members as ‘generous’ and ‘constructive’ and feels that they provide ‘a secure base within which to lower barriers and write more self-revealingly’. Later groups are less significant, but being in small groups suits him. In fact, his view is that ‘without the groups the thing wouldn't have worked … they are the essential basis on which the whole thing runs’.
Equally significant in framing and containing Simon's more challenging and dynamic psyche is his study of theory. In Course 1 he finds particularly appealing Chatman's (1978) schema of textual ‘agents’ in a narrative — narrator, implied author, implied reader — that provides him with a conceptual framework for thinking about the different ‘selves’ and others in his writing. In Course 2 (Creative Writing and the Self) he uses a combination of autobiographical and theoretical writings, including Bakhtin on the ‘multi-voicedness’ of the novel (1984) and Bruner on the cultural shaping of life narratives (1990), to enable him to ‘erect a three dimensional mental framework or scaffolding on which the narratives, events, metaphors and biographical fictions of my life can be spread out and examined’. In Course 4 (Projects: Practical and Theoretical) he draws together Neisser's cognitive psychological schema for understanding different perceptual senses of self (1988) and Damasio's neurophysiological model of conscious and non-conscious selves (2000), to formulate his own self-schema. This brings him ‘a deeper understanding of the structure and basis of a view of the self which is of practical use to me’. Later he develops this into a metaphor of the self as a rope made up of a multitude of strands twisted together and constantly undergoing change although giving an outward impression of uniformity.
This re-conceptualising of the self and the writing process through theory and practice comes to fruition in Simon's final dissertation for Independent Study, where he explores how he has come to understand that he has an unconscious or subconscious ‘writer’, which he refers to as ‘it’ and that is the source, or resource, from which his writing springs. He distinguishes between this unconscious or subconscious ‘writer’ and his more conscious ‘author’ self, and understands his writing process as involving constant negotiation between them. Essentially this requires loosening his tendency to control the story, allowing his material to emerge spontaneously out of his ‘writer’, and then crafting the material into its final form. However, he acknowledges that he is still trying too hard to direct the process, sometimes causing his ‘writer’ to ‘sulk’ or refuse to write, such as when he decides that the end of the novel featuring Anselm and Cyril should take place in Antarctica. Whilst he manages to write this ending: ‘It now sits, okay in itself, but not yet attached to the main story. It has seemed unlikely that my writer will allow it to join in and that instead, another different, darker end will happen’.
Challenges of opening the space for the imagination
Simon's reference to a ‘darker end’ is significant, as he has discovered that his ‘writer’ is as unpredictable as a normally ‘good natured and hard-working [elephant that] can turn nasty and become fatally dangerous from one moment to the next’. He is nervous of this potential for the spontaneous emergence of dark material, which may explain the unspeakability of the writer's experience in the ‘imagined reader’ exercise. He notices that ‘things go best between us’ if he feeds his ‘writer’ some information and then writes whilst partly distracted, by eating a meal for example. Some of his strongest and most formed writing has emerged spontaneously in this way, including a very violent section of the novel, in which a female character is brutally raped and murdered. Its emergence, however, causes Simon to feel ‘revulsion’ and ‘resentment’ at his ‘writer’ and was ‘such a shock to me that I did not write any more for several weeks’.
Opening a dialogue with his ‘writer’ or ‘subconscious source of creative writing’ helps Simon to understand better the main problem he identifies at the start of the MA: how to choose ‘the correct words [to] convey the image in my mind clearly without overwriting’. Whilst he still emphasises his role as director of his writing process, there is evidence that he is beginning to understand it as ‘felt and bodily’ (Nicholls, 2006): referring to the ‘magical knack’ some authors have of transforming writing ‘from mere recording to lively informing’, he says that ‘I can sometimes taste its flavour at the back of my throat’. This metaphor for the feeling of writing indicates a new-found trust in the embodied nature of the creative process that enables him to give it its freedom whilst also managing it. This is captured in the metaphor Simon uses at the end of the MA for his sense of self as a writer, which is very different from the one in ‘Ghost Writer’: ‘I feel now as a self or writing self or learning self as if I might feel as a rancher, standing on the veranda of my ranch house, surveying the wide open prairie of my ability to exist as a learning writer’. Here the writer-self is able to articulate his experience of being a writer and can describe his psychic terrain. That he is characterised as a rancher implies ownership of the space for the imagination and a stronger sense of agency: from the solid and comfortable vantage point of the veranda of his ranch house he is not afraid to confront the potential dangers and challenges of the wild and unpredictable prairie of unconscious processes. But ownership and agency do not imply absolute control; rather there is managed cooperation between the different psychic forces in the writing process. That Simon applies the metaphor not just to his sense of self as a writer, but to his sense of self more generally, indicates that the psychic shift has been systemic, as he later confirms: ‘A whole new satisfactory side of my self has been revealed’.
However, his problem of getting bored with a novel in progress is not completely gone. Deciding to finish it still brings ‘a shallower and less surprising and interesting content to the writing’, but he feels more able to ‘direct the path of my writing towards (at least) an ending and that the end product still surprises and interests me’. He does this ‘partly by agreeing with myself that the rest of the story will be told in subsequent volumes’, but partly also ‘by concentrating on the detail at the surface level of what I'm writing and letting my sub-conscious direct the main thrust of the story, even though I've told it where to go’. These reflections indicate Simon's increased collaboration between his creating ‘writer-self’ and his managing ‘author-self’, and increased trust that any dark material emerging unexpectedly can be coped with.
Fragmentation of the personality and conflicts in the creative process
Material in Simon's Course 2 paper helps to understand the conflict between freedom and control in his creative process. We learn that psychically he feels very fragmented, which he ascribes to his early life. Both his parents were driven to raise themselves out of impoverished backgrounds. His father ventured into the City to work for ‘an upmarket stockbroker’, and when his parents married they lived in a new, semi-detached house in a ‘leafy suburb’. But when glaucoma left his father blind and without his ‘high-status job’, his mother's ‘disappointment and bitterness’ rendered home life ‘miserable’, as she continued to push for a better life for the family through constant relocations. She managed to get Simon a grant into public school that:
disconnected me from my family; I felt apart and different, not least because my mother treated me so. For her I had become, I think, a ‘symbol’, a focal point around which she could build a restructured life narrative that reinforced her progress (climb) into the higher (upper, better) social strata on which her life's ambition was based.
A year after leaving school, Simon found himself, again ‘more or less by accident’, in the armed forces in the Malayan jungle, having to develop another persona in order to integrate into ‘a completely different milieu with completely new or alien social mores and social background’. He describes his life during the 50 years following the war as ‘a series of shows or incidents or happenings or adopted metaphors’. Like a cartoon character in the Daily Express, he ‘pulled a hoop over his head and was instantly transported into a new adventure’. He has lived ‘a continual series of different, often completely disconnected, overlapping, long or short life narratives’. This constant shift of identity meant that he did not form ‘any deep roots’ and, when he married, his wife became ‘the central shaft around which all the other events and narratives in my life have whirled and wheeled’. Now he is a ‘much loved husband, father and grandfather’, which is ‘delightful but feels strange. I have to adapt and adjust my speech and behaviour to fit the mould and keep the narrative going’.
Simon's implicit metaphor for self here of what could be called a quick-change artist implies a sense of inauthenticity at the surface level, with more authentic aspects of himself kept at bay. This connects with what he tells me about his schooling. Simon refers several times to being blocked at school and hating learning, except in art. Because he did not take Latin, he managed to spend one whole day a week in the art room, where he was given complete freedom by the art teacher, an ‘innovative sort of man’. All his learning came from this teacher, whilst ‘the rest of it was forced in in the sort of traditional way’, which he hated. He says he ‘got over that’ later and managed to develop a career and support his wife and family. But it may be that getting over it required keeping out of sight the child-self who simply wanted to play, so that the adult-self could get on with the more mundane business of earning a living, and that the resulting tension between them continues to manifest itself, particularly in creative work where the child-self's playfulness has more legitimate scope for expression. In the final interview I suggest tentatively to Simon that being given freedom all day in the art room to play without interference was formative and had disadvantages as well as advantages. Whilst he was learning to access his spontaneous creativity, he was not learning how to manage it and to bring a product to fruition. He found this idea ‘very true and I mean, looking back, that is a key element; if you want to talk about the self, that is a key element in myself, now that you point it out. Always.’
Creating a dialogue between parts of the personality through narrative techniques
In psychodynamic thinking, parts of the personality that are odds with external circumstances or dominant ways of thinking about oneself tend to get split off and labelled as ‘bad’. Rather than getting rid of them though, this just makes them frustrated and angry — the playful child becomes the murderous ‘wild child’ — necessitating increased psychic control that can have adverse consequences for creative freedom. Simon often refers to having a less ‘nice’ side that he describes as ‘impatient, pushy, grumpy, tactless, bossy and probably arrogant’, but being aware of these characteristics makes it ‘easier for me to control them’. Amongst students on the MA he tries ‘to be nice’, although underneath he ‘knows’ that really he is not; he's a ‘cranky old man’. His dominant way of being with people is to use humour to moderate his darker side — another key element in his make-up, he says — and this is to the fore when he creates fictional characters:he tries ‘to see a good side in most of [them] and … to let them all have some good times and … become involved in something humorous’. So in the novel he begins in Course 1, his darker side is present in the guise of the angry, narcissistic explorer Anselm, but the humorous narrative tone renders him endearing rather than bad and therefore protects writer and readers from the full force of the darkness.
As the MA progresses, however, the humour in Simon's writing gives way to a more visceral representation of his darker side. In Course 3 (Writing Practice) he writes a story (‘Murder’) about Ian Ferris, who murders first the man who killed his daughter, and then, his grief not being assuaged, other people he thinks are murderers, although he has no evidence for this. This self-based character (‘The murderer was partly me’) commits heinous acts, and yet Simon feels sympathy for him and manages to express this by conscious use of double-voiced narrative techniques he is learning. Here is Ferris going fishing after the first murder:
At the big, old, pollarded willow he stopped. A gnarled and twisted mouth and nostrils streamed blood down the bark, screaming silently. He took the fishing rod out of the trolley, assembled it, threaded the line, attached the float and hook and flicked it out into the lake; no blood from the bait, it was already dead . He stood looking out into the lake and into himself. No remorse, that's definite; no guilt, so is that. So, where am I now? The man is dead, excellent, but what about me?
In this extract we learn about Ferris's actions and his tortured inner world both from the outside through third person narration and from the inside through direct thoughts (italics), and free indirect style (underlined). This latter incorporates the thoughts or tone of voice of the character without using speech tags (e.g. ‘he said’), thus rendering it ‘double-voiced’ (see Hunt, 2010a). Opening Ferris up in this way and showing that ‘his internal nature is increasingly separate from his external behaviour’ allows Simon to feel ‘intense sympathy for a person who has lost a much loved child to random violence’ whilst simultaneously being repelled by his actions. Learning to create self-characters who are not wholly ‘nice’ but whom Simon can nevertheless empathise with, or at least tolerate, without the defence of humour, gives him, I would suggest, a middle ground for working more comfortably with the different sides of his personality, which allows more of his psyche to be spontaneously available to him as a writer.
Working with metaphors and images of fluidity and process
Similar benefits accrue from his study and use of metaphor. In ‘Murder’, Simon makes a conscious attempt to deepen the writing ‘by using inference, metaphor and extended metaphor’ for Ferris's acts and state of mind. For example, he tries ‘to develop the use of water as a metaphor for Ferris' life as it changes’. Water is indeed ever present in Ferris's story, from the ‘dank, sour smell of mud and rotting reeds’ of the lake that envelops him as he walks to his fishing spot at the story's start, to the ‘cool womb’ of the sea at the story's end, where he goes diving and ultimately commits suicide. In the final scene, Ferris's immersion in the underwater world creates a powerful metaphor for space and letting go into the body. Just like the ferris wheel, Ferris is stuck in a vicious circle, turning repeatedly in the same groove, driven by his unquenchable anger and inability to grieve. No amount of violent acts assuages his tormented state of mind, but once he is beneath the sea:
[I]t was like an instant rebirth. Gone was the flaying heat. The blinding, head-aching glare vanished, the stench of diesel, hot rubber and hot bodies, was cut off. In its place was a cool womb where he was weightless in a blue-green space full of flitting, flashing colours like his dreams. He rolled effortlessly, seeing first the glittery surface and then the coral reef below with its shoals of technicolour fish. His troubles faded and he felt at last the release for which he had been searching. So this is where it is, this is where I had to go all along ….
Rolling like a seal, totally at home in his new environment, he relinquishes his anger and murderous thoughts, and, before he drowns, he is able at last to grieve for his murdered daughter. Whilst Simon is consciously using metaphors here to capture his character's state of mind, these metaphors also have personal relevance. The character's act of letting go of his entrapment in thought patterns, his distancing from them into a more fluid space, increased physical and psychological movement and expansion into a bodily-felt sense of self, all echo the shift from thinking to feeling, from monologue to dialogue, that characterises Simon's own development.
Something similar happens in a piece called ‘Pencil’ that Simon writes for Independent Study. Here, too, water is a metaphor for fluidity, although this time the letting go is more containing than annihilating. The story is set on a planet with a ‘vast sun’ and two moons. Every time the planet completes a ‘full circuit’ of the sun and lies ‘in linear conjunction’ between the two moons, the combined gravitational pull of these celestial bodies causes the waters to inundate the land. The clans that inhabit the land know that once every generation their villages will be flooded and they will have to make their way to the safety of the City On The Rock if they are to survive.
The City lies at the heart of a network of pencil-straight paths, thin raised lines that radiate out across the land in all directions. As the inundation begins the villagers set off on the long trek along these raised paths that keep them just above the level of the rising water ‘lying in pools and meres, seeping from morass and moor, trickling always south’. The three day walk sees many casualties, as those who cannot keep up sink to the ground and are swallowed up by the encroaching waters. Those who survive and reach the City are fed and housed for the night, but in the morning they must face the ‘ceremony of re-selection’, where they are randomly divided into new clans by the City authorities. The reformed clans head back along the paths that rise up again ‘from the morass of the water-covered land’. They arrive to find villages washed away, ‘but the materials for a new village lay to hand for those that would use them’. So life begins anew, but in the knowledge that the ‘iron compact’ with the City that governs their lives will compel them, in a generation's time, to set off once again for the unknown.
This story contains an extended metaphor for reflexivity: the balance between freedom and control, stability and fluidity, movement rather than fixity that lies at the heart of the creative process and of ‘creative living’ (Rose, 1978) (see Chapter 7). The image of the City at the centre of a network of paths that radiates out in all directions evokes the ferris wheel of ‘Murder’, but where Ferris's ‘wheel’ is stuck in perpetual motion from which only death can offer release, the cycle in ‘Pencil’ is a sustaining framework. Admittedly it is a harsh compact, in terms of both the physical losses along the way and the emotional losses of the re-selection ceremony, but it is there to keep the villages robust, and therefore represents freedom within the constraints. This image also echoes the stability and fluidity in the implicit compact between Simon's rancher-writer and the prairie-unconscious. These spontaneous metaphors for process and fluidity in Simon's writing in the second half of his studies contrast strikingly with his earlier metaphors of closedness and fixity (the lack of dialogue between writer and reader in ‘Ghost Writer’) and fragmentation (‘grasshopper mind’ and quick-change artist). Their presence indicates that Simon's creative processes have loosened up considerably over the two years and that he now has an understanding of writing and of the self as embodied processes that have to be trusted.
‘Pencil’ is one of Simon's ‘Dictionary Pieces’ written in response to single words chosen at random from the dictionary. These he sees as a kind of play where:
I don't have to be the rancher … I'm allowed to write whatever I want to write and stop it when I want to stop it, and I don't have to put any structure into it or anything and if it does end up with a structure that's great.
This supports what I have said about Simon's shift to a more flexible relationship with himself as a writer: he is providing an opportunity for his ‘unruly’ child-self to play, just like the benevolent art teacher of his childhood. But he understands that writing is not just about spontaneity; it also requires ‘learning the skills of construction and repeated practice in order to achieve a more informed spontaneity’. So there is greater cooperation between his different ‘selves’ in the writing process, and this is crucial: without it, he says: ‘nothing will ever get done’.
Simon's development, then, can be characterised as a shift from a sense of fragmentation, with tensions between different parts of himself, towards a greater cognitive flexibility and the ability to utilise a greater range of emotional material for writing, with all the risks and challenges that involves. This implies both an opening-up of the psyche to a more challenging ‘inner terrain’ and a greater confidence that that terrain can be managed.
Notes
1 A study with a larger contingent of men would no doubt be more useful in this regard.
2 All unascribed quotations in the case studies are from the students' questionnaires, interviews, and work for assessment.