Cobra Pit

One of the great things about writing, we’re told, is that it gives you a window into your own mind. There are parts of your hidden self that refuse to percolate to the top of your consciousness along the normal routes, but will sometimes make their way down your arm and through your pen and onto a piece of paper; they enter into your awareness like strangers, even though they live just a few ganglia down the road.

It’s a massively inefficient way to travel, equivalent to going down to the kitchen to get a snack by clambering out the bedroom window and padding around the house and up the porch to your frontdoor, then banging on it til your wife lets you in (Wilma!). But the mind is a strange and stubborn creature, and sometimes that’s the only way to make it understand itself.

I’ve never subscribed to this notion, at least when it comes to my own stuff. I write about ghosts and gods and robots, about time travel and serial killers and animated, sentient chairs. I don’t write about my own experiences. Not much to write about there, I reason to myself, and myself tends to agree.

It’s starting to agree less, though, because I’ve lately began to wonder whether my backbrain is feeding me data on the sly. Your subconscious can be as maddeningly vague as Nostradamus, sometimes: which means that the large reeking barbarian with the battle axe and the speech impediment I wrote about last year might be a stand-in for something else. Probably not, in this case, but you get my point.

That point was driven home solidly this morning, when a friend sent me her critique of a story I just finished. It’s about a woman haunted by the ghost of her husband, and what she does to get rid of him. That’s what it should be about, anyway. What it’s actually about, as my friend pointed out, is how this woman rides the tides of her misery, helpless and out of control, until she washes up on the shore of the story’s climax. Throughout, she does nothing but suffer through her circumstances and acquiesce to her fate.

This has been a persistent pattern since I started writing seriously. All of my characters are victims of whatever’s happening to them, moved along like puppets from one thing to another, mere spectators to their circumstances. They are acted upon. They are weak, and, as a result — and here we come to the cardinal sin — uninteresting. Nobody wants to read about people too feckless to take charge of their own destiny.

I’ve known about this problem for some time, but always chalked it up to a lack of imagination, or skill, or talent: something technical. But this has been going on long enough that I’m starting to wonder whether it says something more profound about my view of the world.

These are not happy things to wonder about, or dwell on, which is why I generally don’t. The subconscious is a lockbox for a reason. I think of it as that ghost trap from the movie Ghostbusters, the one that can suck hundreds of malign spirits into a little ectoplasmic vacuum cleaner bag, and woe to the man who lets them out. Maybe we don’t need to know — or at least know consciously — what drives us. Maybe we shouldn’t know. Maybe it’s dangerous.

But, in this case, whatever’s going on down there is fucking up my writing, and I need for it to stop. Haven’t quite figured what to do about it yet, but I know that I’ll have to proceed with great caution: messing around in your subconscious is like poking through a cobra pit in the dark.