Writers Should Understand the Creative Process

'THE ROAD TO XANADU' by John Livingston Lowes

I recall when I started this creative writing business, I happened to be reading this book by John Livingston Lowes. It is hundreds of pages long and had been a safe doorstop in my house for years before I picked it up to read. It provides a detailed analysis of the working of the imagination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is a fascinating documentation of the theory of the Creative Subconscious, something the great Coleridge believed in himself. Coleridge kept very detailed records of the books he read and here in ‘The Road to Xanadu’ we find a thorough examination of those texts and a feat of superior literary detection by Mr Lowes when looking at Coleridge’s master work, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Lowes convincingly demonstrates how much the poem owes to what Coleridge had read and to the workings of his creative subconscious as it digested what he’d read.

Images, details of navigational and astrological observation, words, phrases, ideas – Coleridge’s imagination was fed by everything he read and he read everything. (It was almost possible then to read everything there was – now it would take you a lifetime to read a year’s worth of the Times Newspaper!) ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ has the feel of a faraway place in its depiction of the becalming of the ship on the Sargasso Sea. The land of ice and snow too feels just as real. The poem's minute and accurate depiction of how it would have been to be on the other side of the world is testament to the documented experiences of others who had been there – Coleridge had never ventured beyond Europe. The poem and so much in the poem could not have been written without the breadth of Coleridge’s reading. But he did not read to plunder the works of others. He read and the reading fed his imagination. Just as all experience does. It’s a natural process in the creative act. This is how the imagination operates when you understand the workings of the creative subconscious - as much as the ways of the subconscious can be understood.  Although we may not be aware of the creative subconscious at work when it is at work, the fact that it is at work is undisputed fact.

When I argue that as artists we do not create in a vacuum, this is what I mean. Read this weighty tome and see just how thoroughly the reading of Coleridge shaped his poem. It is a truly fascinating read, too.

So, when someone trusts you to read something they have written, and asks you to think hard about their piece, to provide a detailed and thorough critique of what they have written, do not be surprised that something of what you read filters into your own work - a thought, a word, an idea, an image. Coleridge understood that for the creative subconscious to be fed the reader has to give all his attention to what he is reading and then by some miraculous process the creative subconscious will borrow what it will from what has been studied and will use the borrowings in the shaping of an imaginative piece of work of its own. It is not a calculated 'theft' of ideas and words and images; it is a process that Coleridge was not in control of (except that he did read with the intensity of one who studies rather than one who just reads) but it is a process that Coleridge recognised at work in his completed poems and a process that he understood and submitted to. As for Coleridge, so for anyone who creates at whatever level they create.

Writers and artists don't need to know this. But knowing it helps you understand something of the creative process and in periods of block knowing how to feed the creative subconscious can be every useful.