how my subconscious writes novels

So I've been working on a revision of a project that I fell in love with last year and wrote an exploratory draft of. The draft was almost completely unusable, as those drafts usually are, sadly. But I did get to know the characters so well that they live in my head and say things to me sometimes. That doesn't always happen. Some characters are shy and live in their own world. Other characters are loud and live in mine.

Over the last few weeks, I have outlined and outlined the novel again and again, as it twisted and turned with each chapter unfolding. I think this is an interesting process to watch, as it teaches me again and again that I need to trust my instincts in the moment of writing and not pretend to think that my conscious mind knows more about story than my unconscious mind does. Sometimes I describe this as needing to let the reader take charge rather than the writer. The reader is the greedy one who wants to be surprised all the time, but also the readers is the one who has read thousands and thousands of novels and knows how they "feel," how pacing needs to be. My conscious writer side has written maybe fifty novels, which isn't nothing, but still.

What happened this week that I loved was that I needed a code between the two MCs. It was a code that one of them had to discover, but I didn't know what it was going to be. The female MC had just realized her brother was sending her messages and she didn't know how to decipher them. Well I, as the writer, didn't know how to decipher them, either. This wasn't something I had set up in advance. And I always feel a little breathless, wondering if I can pull it off. Also, terrified that I can't. That's what I call the editor. I try to offer sacrifices to the editor in my head so that it can quiet down, but it doesn't always work. Also, I tell myself that if worse comes to worst, I can take out the part about the code and work something else in. Or, you know, just throw away the whole book and try something else.

But it worked. I figured out the code. Or rather, my subconscious uncovered it and allowed me at last to see it. The weird thing is, it came from the first line in the book. I honestly can't tell if my subconscious planted that first line from the first, knowing that this was going to be important later on, or if it was just that when I reached this point in the novel, my subconscious reviewed what I had written before and picked that out as the most promising way to deal with the code problem. The first line of the book that I wrote as kind of a throwaway, assuming I'd change it later, though it does tell a very important detail about the brother.

I know there are outliners out there who think this is an insane way of writing. It IS an insane way of writing. I keep trying to outline, which is they way that I wish writing worked for me. And I still think it's useful for me to have a general framework which I can jump off of onto a cement concrete floor if I need to. But I try not to mess with my subconscious too much. It has served me well. I think it tells a truer story than I do. I don't poke around in there, trying to figure why or how it does what it does, because I am superstitious and I don't want to jinx anything. And also, I don't think it would make any difference.

One of the reasons that I read so many books (besides loving them) is that I believe that the more I read, the more raw material I have for my subconscious to twist around and make into its own. The story strategies that other authors use I can steal for my own devices on either a conscious or subconscious level. I talk about what I can see them doing, but there is always stuff that I can't see the first time around. I believe my subconscious sees it, though, and learns from it. Not just from books, either. From movies and TV and everything in life.

I always think that this way of seeing writing is borrowed from Stephen King's On Writing which I read years ago when it first came out and thought was brilliant. But I suspect that if I went back and read it again now I might be surprised to find that he didn't say the things that I think he did about reading and the subconscious, that I've twisted them and made them my own. Loke I always do.