Creativity

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In my early twenties I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. When I finished the “artist’s coming of age story” I had a strong impulse to write a novel based loosely on Joyce’s masterpiece but understood that I needed to live a little before tackling such a beast.

The Big Clock

Years past and one day the itch to write the book arose. And I felt confident. So I completed my first draft. Based on a structure reminiscent of the film-noir classic The Big Clock the first draft had potential. The second and third drafts fleshed out the characters, streamlined the form, but revealed a trouble narrator.

 

P minor blue

A year and a half passed without a solution to the narrator problem, until one day. When I started I took a different approach to writing.

 

Metapsychological Formulation

Recently I have been exploring the creative process in a somewhat different way. It’s based on the ideas of Dr. Harry Anderson, a psychoanalyst who recently released his life’s work in a book called From an Art to a Science of Psychoanalysis, The Metapsychological Formulation Method. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in how the mind works, or in dismantling psychological obstacles.

Free Association

Stream of consciousness is key to the work of James Joyce. It captures that sense of free association where the mind is free to go where it needs to go. From a creative perspective the idea is to let come what comes and follow that. This is similar to how I worked before only I would stop midstream and finesse the material instead of going where creativity was taking me.

Using free association is a lot like improvising on a musical instrument in performance. You don’t go back and fix or work on a section, you just play and go where the music takes you. I have found writing this way leads me into the unexpected, and when I am finished there is very little that needs to be changed.

Flashback

In the fourth draft the Narrator has come alive, and the characters are richer. The structure is similar (a stolen car crashes, the protagonist re-experiences the key moments in his life up until the crash, the story continues) but the jump back in time, unlike the flashback in The Big Clock, takes the protagonist back to before he’s born, to the night he’s conceived.

When It’s Ready

I can’t say when the novel will be finished. We’ll just have to wait and see.