The Completion Club Module Twenty-four – Fragments of Experience

“A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” – Frank Capra

The Importance of Hunches

Recently, I have become particularly interested in the importance of ‘the hunch’. As I begin a new novel and experience, once again, that sense of ‘lostness’ that I often feel when starting a new project, I am reminded of how I must attend to my hunches and I must trust them.

The image above is of a bird hide in the middle of a forest that I visited on my holiday last year. It’s not a particularly striking image in itself. But I remember the precarious walk to the hide, the fear of it being dilapidated and collapsing with us inside; I remember climbing up into the darkness; I remember the absence of birds. But more than this, I am aware of what the hide has since become, in my imagination and what role it might play in the book I am about to write.

The creative process is nothing if not mysterious. When I begin a novel, I always work in fragments. I write scenes that may or may not be important. Later, I reject most of them but some solidify and develop into something new. I write pages of

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random notes about what a story ‘might’ be. Only later, when a few characters have taken shape, once I have the voice, do I return to the early notes to see what might now be useful. Some of these early notes can immediately be discarded; others are immensely valuable.

It seems to me that the most interesting books grow organically – when we allow ourselves to dive into images and ideas that appeal to us, even if we don’t know why. I think that we must attend to our hunches, to the things that draw us inexplicably and we must trust the instinct that drives us to that place. We have to trust that our subconscious self knows more than our conscious mind ever can. And we have to take notice of the moments in our own experience that seem significant.

This might seem airy-fairy – and of course, some writers prefer to attend to structure first. For me, it’s a two-pronged approach. I invent scenes and characters, happy not to know where they are leading me. Then later, I ask myself – how might I structure this? How might these two scenes be connected? Do they belong in the same book? In the past, I have been asked “how do you invent these elaborate plots?” and my answer is always – I attend to what seemed important at the time and I let my imagination draw me.

Fragments of Experience:

If you are not used to working in this way, it can be a daunting process. Even if you’re in the middle of a book however, it might be worth playing with this approach as an exercise, to see where it leads you.

Fifteen years ago, I ran a class on ‘Autobiography and Fiction’ and today I’d like to share the exercise that I used in the first class I gave. The intention of the exercise was to train writers to use their own experience in their work, whilst also maintaining a distance from this experience. You can use this exercise if you are working on a memoir, but you can also use it if you are writing fiction, in which case I suggest you choose an incident that you think might have relevance to your fictional world. In many ways, our books are disguised maps of our lives, even when the worlds we draw are immensely different from our everyday reality: something of ourselves is woven in.

Writing from Experience – An Exercise:

Think about a brief moment or incident in your life which has significance for you. It does not have to be something dramatic, nor does it have to be life-changing. But it must feel significant in some way (even if it is in a mysterious way); ideally it should be something you have never written about.

Now, decide on how you would like to write about this event. Do you want to write it as memoir or fiction or as a story within your non-fiction work? Do you want to write factually or poetically? Is this a portrait of a character or a dramatic action scene? Is this a story or an impression?

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Rules:

1. Do not write in the first person. The purpose of this exercise is to experiment with distancing yourself from your own experience. Write about yourself as if you were somebody else, in the third person. Give the character a name.

2. Write non-stop for forty to fifty minutes. Try not to censor yourself too much or to correct yourself. Just continue to write. It doesn’t matter if you stray from what really happened and start making it up.

3. When you have finished, put it away and don’t read it back.

What next?

Several hours later/the next day - pick up the work again and read it through. Spend some time thinking about the piece and how it might be changed/improved. The following questions may be of use:

1. Might this piece be useful to my work-in-progress? How?

2. What here might capture a reader’s attention? How might I rewrite the scene to highlight this further?

3. What is unexpected here?

4. What could be stronger?

5. Does the writing have a theme or attitude? How might I highlight that in a rewrite? How might this relate to my work-in-progress?

6. Try reading the piece aloud as a radio script. Does it attract and hold a listener’s attention? What parts did you enjoy reading?

Finally, leave it a week and return to this piece. Would you like to revise it and use it in your work? This time you can write more slowly, taking time to consider the structure of the piece, the pace and your use of language.

Share:

What have you learnt about writing from experience or writing in fragments? Do share your thoughts on the group forum.

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