“X or Y has written a novel.” What does that mean?
It is quite simple: he has used his imagination to portray people who do not really exist, has invented experiences for them and woven it all together. In broad terms that, or something like it, is the general opinion.
Everyone assumes they know what imagination is, but there are very few who are aware of the remarkable forms of imaginative power that exists.
What is one to say when one’s hand, usually such a willing tool of the mind, suddenly refuses to write the name of the hero of the story one has thought up, and insists on choosing a different one instead? Is it not enough to make one pause and ask oneself, “Am I really the one who is ‘creating’ this work or is my imagination merely some kind of receiver for supernatural communications? Something like what is called, in the sphere of wireless telegraphy, an aerial?”
There have been cases of people getting up in their sleep at night and completing pieces of writing, which, tired from the day’s toil, they had left unfinished, and finding better solutions than they would probably have been capable of when awake. People tend to explain such things by saying it was done by their subconscious, which is usually asleep.
If something like that happens in Lourdes, they say the Mother of God came to their aid.
Who knows, perhaps the subconscious and the Mother of God are the same thing?
Which is not to say that the Mother of God is simply the subconscious, no, the subconscious is the ‘mother’ of ‘god’.
-> extract from Gustav Meyrink – “The White Dominican, translated by Mike Mitchell; UK: Dedalus/Ariadne, 1994 (pg 15) [Gosh, the MLA style really IS getting at me! xD)
Yes, I agree that I might sound mightily mystical and naive and air-headed; but, in all honesty, I agree with Meyrink. I am, indeed, one of those people who believe in inspiration, in the supernatural as source of creativity, no matter what anyone says. I admit that real life and real events can provide, to a certain extent, writing material, yet that material comes only to fill in the gaps between the ideas which you get only when in a “special” state of mind. And this state of mind doesn’t appear at your own command. Instead, I believe, it is something that you “pick up”, from the aether, maybe, as Meyrink says. Some could argue that Meyrink was a crafty charlatan, that he intended to manipulate his readers. It might be so. Yet the fact that he actually succeeds to induce certain feelings to the reader suggests, in itself, that there’s at least some truth to what he’s trying to point out. And that’s the truth which, I believe, you feel when writing in a “turmoil” of inspiration. Can you really be an artist without inspiration? Can you really be an artist when you’ve never felt, not even from time to time, that it isn’t you who’s actually writing, but someone – or something – else? Call me a fool and a child, but I don’t believe in artists who make their own “inspiration”. I believe that you can’t write something good, something valuable, unless you feel that urge, somewhere deep inside, to jot down the words, to shape the phrase in such a way that it expresses – well you don’t know what it expresses, but the cloud that’s in your mind at the point certainly does. Who is to say that we’re not dreaming our past and future lives and then conveying them on the paper? Who is to say that we’re not, indeed, creating real lives within our stories, lives which don’t permit first and second drafts, just like our own lives don’t admit their writing and rewriting?
