Automatic Writing

What is it and how to do it

I just read an article from Coffee Times by Barry Chaffee, on how to break through writer’s block. It was about automatic writing, just writing what comes into your head without censoring or editing. I started to write about my experience with this in the comments, and decided to continue with it here.

When I first heard of automatic writing, I thought I had no active part in the writing, but was waiting for another part of me to do that, while I held fingers poised over the keypad, or cradling a ballpoint pen. I sat for awhile and nothing much happened. It might work automatically for some people, though.

Milton Erickson related that he’d agreed to do a column for some periodical, and was going to write it the next day, but when he got up in the morning it was beside the typewriter, finished. He realized his unconscious had done it, and so trusting was he of his faithful companion that he didn’t even proof it, just put it in an envelope and posted it.

He said that each time this column was due the same scene would repeat, and he would find it finished, and post it without double-checking it. Erickson had an extraordinary relationship with the unconscious, which allowed him to become the world’s foremost authority and innovator in the field of hypnosis. He understood that his ego consciousness was, in the scheme of things, a minor player with a low security clearance.

There is hypnosis before Erickson and after Erickson, as there is neurology before and after Charcot.

I was never able to just sit passively and receive writing from the heavens without jump starting the process, and jump starting began with an image sequence. The writing both evoked and captured the images. The only writing advice I am aware of from William Burroughs, probably the best writer of the last century, was,

“If you can’t see it, you probably can’t show it to somebody else.”

When I read about active imagination, that made more sense to me than automatic writing, which in my mind evoked the image of an Ouija board. The concept of active imagination is more like engaging the dreaming mind, and writing your dreams as they unfold.

Active imagination is a way to realize that not only are we always dreaming, if I tell you what I did yesterday, what happened to me, you can read that just like you read a dream. It changes the mind.

“The Greek Orthodox Church in America teaches that “The Greek term for repentance, metanoia, denotes a change of mind, a reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook, of man’s vision of the world and of himself, and a new way of loving others and God.”

I did several of these Ash Fork series, all of them different narratives. One day Linda asked me if I had anything novel length to send to a contest, which had an approaching deadline. I ran a word count on each series and there was one which was 60k words, just about right. It was an odd sequence which began with the image of a man losing his shadow, which wandered away, alone, in the night.

The image was derived from an encounter I had with a man who was sitting outside my house, and I was rude asking him to not hang out there. He told me he was a neighbor and extended a hand, which I took. He held it with an iron grip and told me I need to be more aware of how I am talking to other people. There is something especially odious about being told the truth about yourself when you are in the wrong. I felt a fury that wanted to justify itself.

That was the shadow.

When I began to write the first part was about the incident, with me as a crazy old man who lived in a little yellow house on a street in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset. The yellow house has the sun aspect, and is a container, so it seemed to me a symbolic representation of the psyche.

From this place the shadow departed and was walking down Mission Street. He was an American Indian from the Creek tribe, but he had no memory of a past. At 16th Street, where the prisoners used to be released from San Quentin, he encounters a midget just out of prison for shooting somebody’s balls off. Indian Shadow is looking for Cowboy Jesus, his lost child. He asks Lewis if he’s Cowboy Jesus and Lewis says yes. The midget rides on Indian Shadow’s shoulders, in the configuration of the ego identity over the instinctual man.

The images told the story and I came along behind them, transcribing. It was just a matter of cleaning it up. Then I realized that the 60k word count was reading two drafts, so in reality, I had a 30k word piece. I decided to edit in some material from other Ash Forks in the series, and write chapters needed to connect them.

The chapters I wrote to connect them were the best ones. Indian Shadow died at the Ferret House Hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona after failing to come out of a holy man trance. This opened the transition from linear time to non linear time, so that events were related but not sequential. I finished right before deadline and sent it off, though of course it was not going to win any prizes in that configuration. Also, it was politically incorrect to call little people midgets, dwarves and trolls. I didn’t allow the conscious mind to change it to conform to correctness any more than I would change it in a fairy tale.

I could have gone through the book and shaped it into something else, with popular appeal, but when it was finished I was finished with it, and moving on to something else. With imagination active, there’s always something to write about.