Sometimes
when writing a particular scene I've had the experience that all of a sudden the
words poured out of me, a psychic might say something like “you’re channeling a
guide/mentor, or the Akashic Records”. Or, perhaps I could best describe it as
a deeply meditative state, where everything your mind’s eye sees is brilliantly
vivid and real. After this storm of writing passes, you lapse back, exhilarated
and amazed, and realize that what you’ve written is some of your best yet.
It’s
something of a “mountain top” experience, though. Not something you can
deliberately coax it into being.
You may attempt to seduce it, but it comes only when it wills. I was curious whether other writers
shared this phenomenon; so I posed this question to other writers in the
blogasphere:
...If this is something you've experienced, please tell me about it; was it after hours of plodding work, or did it happen as soon as you set fingers to keyboard. What was your frame of mind? Did something put you in that frame of mind, i.e.: were you listening to music? Reading some other writer’s work and suddenly…”
The
answers flew in, and yes whether in a meditative state such as I’ve
experienced, or from the sub-conscious world of dreams, writers agree that from
there, they’ve draw their best inspirations. Here’s some samplings of the
responses I’ve had:
“I’ve experienced the same feeling of
writing as if someone is moving my fingers...
“My characters come to life in my
dreams. Sometimes I wake up pretty tired but I get some of my best scenes that
way. It’s almost like they are writing the story and I just type it.”
This
aspect of our characters taking the bit between their teeth and running with it
seems to be a common thread in many responses.
“…sometimes when I’m writing, my
character will reveal something about him/herself that I didn’t know.”
Or
how about this comment, “My characters won’t leave me alone—and usually at
two o’clock in the morning! I can’t shut them up until I write them.”
“…an
out of body experience. I’m the vessel, for whatever is being said. It’s the
best high out there.”
Perhaps
as a reader of books you have read some in which you’ve become totally immersed
in the novel’s world in all its detail: you taste the food, smell the air and
live in the skin of the characters—you are moved by their grief, shaken by
their terrors, and can shed tears of joy for their happiness. When the book
closes, you know that your life has been enriched. That book was written by a
writer on fire
