Of my twenty nonfiction books, three novels (the Lamplight Trilogy), and two story collections, none of it was written by myself. I have learned to partner with my internal committee.
Strange, this notion that we invent things by ourselves. What a weight of responsibility for the poor conscious self to bear! No wonder we get writer’s block.
When I get stuck, I turn to “my” characters.
For example, one day I finished what seemed the first draft of a novelette and went for a walk. Drawing on C. G. Jung’s technique of active imagination, I summoned up the figure of Lucas, the protagonist. There he hovered in my mind’s eye, a brown-haired man in his forties in a cowboy hat and boots. In a prior conversation, he had said the work should be a novel.
“It looks at this point like something shorter,” I told him. “I’ve run out of story to tell.”
“Well,” he said, “there is a whole other life I lead that you know nothing about yet.”
Then he told me. No details, no events. Just a few words about that side of himself.
I stopped in astonishment and thought it over. Then I went home and began writing more. Soulmapper grew into a novel of 96,000 words and two indexes. Lucas was right. (If you read my novel, you’ll know what he told me as soon as you start Chapter Four.)
According to a couple of surveys of fiction writers visiting Edinburgh, about 65% of authors talk to our characters. About the same number believe our characters have agency, which means a certain amount of autonomy. This fits perfectly with Jung’s experience using active imagination.
Imaginal beings aren’t made up by the conscious mind no matter how much it might feel like it. They lurk below dark waters, in our fantasies and dreams, waiting to surface and express themselves. “I did not create Earthsea,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote; “I discovered it.” An imaginal figure named Soul told Jung he should drink less red wine and give up his morning pipe.
Jung regarded such figures as personifications of the unconscious. The mind has an almost magical ability to turn just about any experience into a character, image, or symbol. In my dreams, for example, my car symbolizes my drive, my ability to move forward in life. (In car dreams it’s interesting to note details like the condition of the vehicle, how fast it moves, whether it is stuck or missing, and who is driving it.)
By Jung’s reasoning, Lucas is a personification of an aspect of my unconscious. A lively aspect. He showed up in my dreams at least a year before I decided to write my first novel.
So it makes sense that Lucas resembles me in some ways. He looks a bit like I did twenty years ago. He has a few of my interests, including poetry and mythology. He’s familiar with California, and he develops a sense that each place he visits is unique. But that’s about it. I don’t have his background, he’s an extraverted charmer, his line of work has never been mine, and goatees like his make me look like the devil, so I avoid them. He can talk his way out of just about any difficulty; I wish I could.
Jung would likely say that Lucas represents my shadow, the dark, unconscious side of my personality. Maybe. But what Jung’s internal cast of characters tried to tell him over and over (read Jung’s Red and Black Books for examples) is that, beyond any similarities with us, they are their own. “We are real and not images,” one character tells him, startling him.
The notion that imaginal beings possess their own special reality goes far back. The ancient Egyptians knew of it. From them, it worked its way into alchemy, then into Islamic gnosis of the kind taught by Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabi. For these learned men, the imaginal was not made up, but a realm of being that went by different names: Hurqalya, Mt. Qaf, the Interworld.
The emphasis on imaginal autonomy then passed into European alchemy and, later, a number of other areas of endeavor, including the European Renaissance, Romantic poetry and philosophy, American Transcendentalism, and of course Jungian psychology. Parallel traditions run through many cultural backgrounds. Hermann Hesse called the imaginal realm the Magic Theater.
For the creative, imaginal figures provide invaluable guidance. They bring us ideas, collaborate in the work, alert us when we go off the storied path. They often surprise us. In my second novel, Heartlander, for example, a chapter ends with Simeon Mackenzie sitting on a hilltop in Martinez, California. Having no idea what came next, I was on the point of letting the story sit for a while when a figure out of Simeon’s past appeared in my imaginings and said, “Bingo.” Aha! So I stayed at my keyboard and kept going.
My tales contain plot twists that my conscious mind could never have come up with on its own. The big reveal at the end of Chapter 17 of Soulmapper just fell on me after I had written most of the novel. When I started making notes for Lamplighter, the third novel, I thought that Nigel Calvaire would narrate it, but he’s too curt for such a task. Nigel is a man of rapid actions but few words, although in A Chorus of Resistance he speaks for long enough to narrate an adventure of his.
For Lamplighter, a new character gradually emerged from the mists, a centaur of a man with a difficult past and a quirky outlook. Of the trilogy’s three protagonists, Kay is the least like me. I never saw him coming.
Many are the ways we can access such guides, for they appear in our dreams, fantasies, intuitions, and creations, including stories. When ignored, they even hide in our conflicts and symptoms.
Whatever invitational methods we use (and I teach some at my school and in workshops), the most important attitude to bring is openness. I thought I might have a novel in me at best, but the characters of the Assembling Terrania Cycle had other plans.
The five books of the Cycle are:
1. Soulmapper
2. Heartlander
3. Lamplighter
4. Tales of Terrania Rising
5. A Chorus of Resistance
For more about my work, visit Chalquist.com/fiction.
Comments