The Weirding of the Writing Process: Channeling Society's Metanarratives (Part 1)

Beautiful weather in South Euclid. Enjoying some delicious "Blue Moon" coffee, roasted by Phoenix Coffee down the street from my place. If you ever find yourself in Cleveland, I recommend giving this place a try.

My wife is currently holed up in the Kelvin Smith Library at Case because her qualifying examinations are in less than three days. Thus, I find myself in my house with my cat, the Lump, for company.

The Lump on a kind of throne. I hope I don't lose readers for this.

My post today is one of two, which will be focused on the first step of the writing process.

One of the most difficult tasks that writers struggle with is coming up with ideas.

Writing theorists call this part of the writing process invention, a term they take from various Greek and Latin treatises on rhetoric. Other folks talk about this phase in the writing process as prewriting, which refers to all the thinking, note taking, or outlining you do before you begin drafting. Other folks include both invention and prewriting in their vision of the writing process; they understand invention as the cognitive processes one executes to “come up” with ideas and the prewriting phase as that time when one organizes those ideas before drafting.

There’s a problem, I think, that all of these schematics try to cover over, which anyone who has sat in front of a blank computer screen can identify. This problem is better stated as a question: where do my ideas come from? 

This is where the stakes lie, where how we describe the first phase of the writing process-- invention or prewriting—starts to matter.

To use the term invention is to imply that our ideas just spring fully formed, from our unconscious, as if we’re Zeus-like gods and our story ideas are so many Athenas springing from our mind. To use the term prewriting is to dodge the question, to make the “coming up” with ideas to be less a matter of creation and more a matter of “organization.”

I’d like to propose an alternative vision of this primal and no doubt most important part in the writing process. Where do our ideas come from? In a word: society.

Let me be clear: this isn’t a very new idea, I’m just coming to it from a novel perspective, the perspective of a creative writer.

Narrative theorists have long mulled over this idea: we understand, connect to, become thrilled by stories because they conform to a specific social code, to socially entrenched metanarratives that we use to understand our place in the world, the nature of the world, morality, justice, good, evil—all of those things.

According to narrative theorists, the stories that cohere and that are effective—that are “the best,” if you will--are ones that we can follow. Big disclaimer: this is different than saying, say, that the best stories are the stories that we can anticipate. Being able to follow a story and being able to anticipate it because of unoriginality are two separate things.

But let me get back to “coming up” with story ideas. As far as I’m concerned, we don’t. Or, if we did, no one would be able to follow them.

A better verb than “to come up with” or “to invent” or “to create” to describe that weird alchemical process that produces new characters, new scenarios, new conflicts is to channel.

"Channel" comes from the old French word for a bed of water, a groove in the ground, a gutter, a pipe, etc.. We use it in fantasy writing in other contexts: to channel a spirit is to conjure it up, to create a bridge between this world and that.

Why do I think it best to describe the first phase of the writing processes metaphorically? In terms of channeling spirits?

Stay tuned for part 2 of this post, which will come tomorrow. I plan on including a writing exercise with it.