Ok guys,
Let me get a head start on next semester.
I picked up this book "Writers on writing: collected essays from The New York Times" and there's an interesting essay in there by Carolyn Chute, "How can you create Fiction when reality comes to call?". So she's basically writing about how it's impossible to come up with any work of creative fiction while being surrounded by the brouhahas of everyday urban life. Here is an interesting excerpt;
"Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission. Complete submission."
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I really like the idea of "complete submission" here. I find that it corresponds to my earlier post about staying close to the content of the story in order to find the best expression for it. Here, you are to go so close that writing it is dreaming it.
Funny that Samantha's post also talks about submission, but in a slightly different context--more about giving in to a persistent story idea than letting yourself be absorbed by the story while writing it. Still, maybe this multiple usage of "submission" signifies something important. Both Michaels and Chute (as well as Whitman in my post) seem to be insisting on giving up power. They seem to want to want to ground the process in less active, forceful terms.
Whitman and Chute both say explicitly that, rather than authoring or creating, we as writers channel, "vessel." They almost seem to be describing a flood that overwhelms and overtakes, to which they have no choice but to submit.
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