Suppose you start to write a story and your opening sentence describes a sunrise. To select the words of that sentence alone, you must have absorbed a great deal of knowledge which has become so automatic that your conscious mind need not pause on it.
Language is a tool which you had to learn; you did not know it at birth. When you first learned that a certain object is a table, the word table did not come to your mind automatically; you repeated it many times to get used to it. If you now attempt to learn a foreign language, the English word still leaps into your mind. It takes many repetitions before the foreign word occurs without your being conscious of groping for it.
Before you sit down to write, your language has to be so automatic that you are not conscious of groping for words or forming them into a sentence. Otherwise, you give yourself an impossible handicap.
In your description of sunrise, you want to convey a certain mood. The sunrise, let’s 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 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.
All writers rely on their subconscious. But you have to know how to work with your own subconscious.
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
- what kind 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, you will sit and stare at a blank sheet of paper.
***
The above excerpts are taken from the edited version of an informal course of lectures given by Ayn Rand in her own living room in 1958. The editing is done by Tore Boeckmann and the book is published by the Penguin Group.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 