you give yourself an impossible handicap.
In your description of a sunrise, you want to convey a certain mood; the sunrise, let us say, is an ominous one. That requires different words than a description of a bright, cheerful sunrise would. Consider how much knowledge goes into your ability to differentiate between the two intentions. What is ominous? What is cheerful? What kind of concepts, words, metaphors will convey each? All that was at one time conscious knowledge. Yet if you had consciously to select your words, including all the elements needed to establish a certain mood—if you had to go through the whole dictionary to decide which word to start with, and the same for the next word, and if you then had to go through all the possibilities of conveying the mood—your whole lifetime would not be enough to compose that one description.
What then do you do when you write a good description, fitting your purposes, within a reasonable amount of time according to your skill? You call on stored knowledge which has become automatic.
Your conscious mind is a very limited “screen of vision”; at any one moment, it can hold only so much. For instance, if you are now concentrating on my words, then you are not thinking about your values, family, or past experiences. Yet the knowledge of these is stored in your mind somewhere. That which you do not hold in your conscious mind at any one moment is your subconscious.
Why can a baby not understand this discussion? He does not have the necessary stored knowledge. The full understanding of any object of consciousness depends on what is already known and stored in the subconscious.
What is colloquially called “inspiration”—namely, that you write without full knowledge of why you write as you do, yet it comes out well—is actually the subconscious summing-up of the premises and intentions you have set yourself. All writers have to rely on inspiration. But you have to know where it comes from, why it happens, and how to make it happen to you.
All writers rely on their subconscious. But you have to know how to work with your own subconscious.
What you will find today is the exact opposite. Most writers cannot account even for why they chose to write a particular story, let alone for the manner in which they wrote it. In effect, they take the attitude of the worst medieval mystics. You have probably heard the mystic formula: “For those who understand, no explanation is necessary; for those who don’t, none is possible.” That is the slogan of religious mystics—and of artistic mystics. The simple meaning of that sentence is: “I don’t know why I’m doing it, and I don’t intend to explain.”
If you do not want to be reduced to such a condition, you have to be conscious of your premises in general, and of your literary premises in particular. You have to train yourself to grasp your premises clearly, not merely as general rules with a few concretes to illustrate them, but with a sufficient number of concretes so that the full meaning of the premises becomes automatic to you. Every premise that you store in your subconscious in this manner—namely, thoroughly understood, thoroughly integrated to the concretes it represents—becomes part of your writing capital. When you then sit down to write, you do not need to calculate everything in a slow, conscious way. Your inspiration comes to the exact extent of the knowledge you have stored.
To describe a sunrise, you must have stored in your mind clear ideas of what you mean by “sunrise,” what elements compose it, what kinds you have seen, what mood you want to project and why, and what kinds of words will project it. If you are clear on all these elements, they will come to you easily. If you are clear on some but not others, it will be harder to write. If you are not clear at all—if you have nothing but “floating abstractions” in your subconscious (by that I mean abstractions which you do not connect to concretes)—you will sit and stare at a blank sheet of paper. Nothing will come out of your mind because you have put nothing into it.
A writer, therefore, has to know how to use his subconscious, how to make his conscious mind use it as a Univac [an early computer]. A Univac is a calculating machine; but someone has to feed it the material and has to set the stops and make the