Back to the Brande
This short post is returning to my reading and commenting on Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. Picking up in chapter three, “The Advantages of Duplicity,” the first subsection about how a story is formed made me stop for a moment to consciously think about whether or not I am aware of this process she suggests.
The process isn’t one layer. Oh, no, this is a four layer process. Yes, four layers. Did that shock you, too?
To review, she has the origin of stories in the unconscious she called it. Agreed. I do believe that. How many stories have you heard came in a dream? Clearly unconscious origins. We agree, yes?
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And of course once we have the unconsciously inspired idea it comes into our conscious, we will say via a dream here, to move this along. This being layer two. Makes sense. And Brande mentions how writers will poke and prod this idea, work with it and make it something interesting, to us the writer at least.
The third layer is when it goes back to the unconscious to dwell, here I think of it more as the subconscious. (That debate between terms may be another blog post before this 90 day project ends.) This layer is where we may forget about the story, and it lingers getting untold unconscious additions and subtractions. When the writer feels that they have lost the story, she says that is when it moves back to the conscious.
This last conscious layer is where we begin working on the actual writing of the story. This fourth layer is where we are begin writing and working with drafts and revisions.
No wonder we call our story projects our babies and the editing process is so easily related to a brutal action of killing our darlings. We go through a process of so much internal conceptual work to get to the story. They are like our children.
