Speaking for myself, I find what you are discussing her critical to my really enjoying a book. Good authors will often speak of characters who were meant to play a certain role and at some point in the narrative sat up and decided to do something else. My favorite authors are the ones who let them do this and let the chips fall where they may.
Yes, exactly. I would guess that almost every author lets the characters speak to some degree, although different authors are more or less able to "tap into the depths" and really connect to what we could call the "living essence" of a character or place or idea.
I recommended Dianne Wynn Jones above, and when I was exploring her works I found many people raving about how great Fire and hemlock is. So I read it and was ... underwhelmed. On reading the authors own words about the book I realized why. It was a very tightly and deliberately crafted story, plotted out before the characters had identities of their own, and they were not allowed to stray from their tasks. Like actors working to a script and not being given leeway to explore the characters, it fell a bit flat for me. This is not, incidently, a problem I found in Mrs Jones's other works.
I hear that. This is the sort of "intellection" I was referring to that makes writing more of a science then an art, and it then loses its juice. It does have its place, and certain works are clearly, intentionally allegorical to perhaps make a point. But I think the key is the degree to which there is a
quality of the unkown, a tingling feeling of mystery which I think is the felt-sense of what Tolkien calls Faerie.
I know that as a writer I tap into this to varying degrees at different times. When I'm dabbling with ideas and I get that "tingling feeling" I know I'm on the right track. This is different than the more intellectual "eureka" of connecting the dots, like finding a missing puzzle piece in the plot or backstory. It is more like getting a sense that there is a border to the puzzle, and an Other World beyond that border. It is certainly a feeling of otherness (to the conscious mind), yet it is also a quality of going deeply
within.
I haven't read Coleridge, I suppose I should put him on my "to be read" list, but it's a long list. However while reading your quotes earlier in this thread I was reminded of a book called "Proust was a Neuroscientist" which describes how many modern explorations of the brain are often confirming, with more technical jargon, what earlier writers had reported. Coleridges divisions of the creative processes ring very true to what we know about creative processes in modern cognitive theory. Or, to quote another author "Creativity has deeper springs than does conciousness." As I mentioned, it is quite perceptible to the reader when an author does or does not employ the deeper creative process you mention.
Yes! Nicely put. I haven't read a ton of Coleridge either, by the way, mainly his thoughts on imagination; the quote up thread gives the gist of it, but I think he expands upon it elsewhere.
But what you say reminds me of the connection of modern physics and cosmology and Eastern philosophy. Sometimes we need to rediscover what we've previously known, yet in a more contemporary idiom.
But I think the key here to this discussion is that creativity and imagination come from "deeper springs" than the conscious mind. Creativity is not simply figuring out how to put something together, just as imagination is not simply being able to create an image in one's mind. It is connecting to something deeper/other/within oneself, that
has the feeling of, if not the actual ontological status of, being other to oneself. This is why many fantasy authors describe their sub-creations as being more like discovering another world than building something from scratch. I find that the worlds that are build from scratch tend to be less dynamic, vital and alive.
That said, the creative process isn't a completely passive matter of simply downloading information, like Tolkien would smoke opium and then start having visions of Middle-earth and then write them down (although, on a side note, I read somewhere that the fantasy world Talislanta was rather strongly influenced by the author's liberal use of psilocybin!). It is a co-creative process, certainly with a receptive quality of opening to Otherness, but also an active component of weaving it all together, bringing it into form. This may include intellection and, to quote Pemerton, "the deployment of cultural motifs." But those are surface waters.
That's one of the reasons I'm so fond of Lois Bujold as an author, since her approach to writing, while very scholarly and well informed, often consists of handing her characters horrible situations and then sitting at back to see what they do, and that sort of organic, emergant process makes for a better book. IMHO. Aided of course by the fact that Lois is keenly aware that the reader is the authors partner in reading the book, rather than a passive observer. (Read "Dreamweavers Dilema" for her essay on this.)
I will chek it out! As for Bujold, I read part of one of her books -
Curse of Chalion, I believe - some years ago and remember enjoying it, but didn't finish it for some reason. I do remember that it was well written, with real characters.
