Refreshing the Wells 29: Jay Caselberg

Jay Caselberg Jay Caselberg is one of those fascinating people whose wide and varied life is reflected in his wide and varied fiction. Here’s how he refreshes his wells:

 

“It’s funny, the link with water, for as it happens, most of my inspired thinking comes standing under the shower. It is there where I get that thought, that phrase, that sentence that spurs a new story. And where does it come from? Of course, I read as if starved, generally having about four or five books on the go and that reading is across multiple genres. I read a lot of crime, lit, sf, horror, spy novels, though not much non-fiction unless I’m researching something in particular. Once upon a time, and I think this is perhaps a phase that a writer goes through, I had great difficulty reading because I found it impossible to turn off the critical analytical eye. Thankfully that passed. There’s a trap there also in constant reading, and that is that you need to be careful not to taint that well water. I also believe, however, that that’s a phase one goes through as well, gathering pieces of understanding and learning that go to make up the collage that shapes your particular voice. It’s an important part of the journey to move beyond wanting to write like someone else and instead write like yourself. All that reading needs to be a part of what feeds the voice. This is where the shower comes in, the post-sleep analysis that comes from a night of dreaming. I’m a firm believer that in my particular process, most of the work is done by my subconscious, parsing events, the things I read, world events, images and most of all, human interaction. Many of my short stories have come from dream images or scenes. Not all, but a significant proportion. Sometimes I wake, energised by the fact that I’ve just had a “story dream.”

Many of us go through fallow periods, and these are the times, at least for me, when that lizard brain entity is putting things together. I might have an idea and it can lie there for a few days, or even a few weeks or longer while somewhere, somehow, the deep brain is working it out. I don’t quite know how I know, but when it finally happens, I somehow have an awareness that it’s ready and it is only then that it turns into a story or part of a novel and I sit down and write. I don’t think the well is actually empty during those times, but rather that its contents are going through some sort of filtration process, seeping through the rocks of gathered experience. So, yes, I go places, I read stuff, I watch people, and I absorb, and then, above all, I dream. There’s something fascinating about the disconnectedness of dream images, their unconventional realities that are still in some way connected to the day to day and yet apart from it. In a dream, everything is so real and yet it is not. Writing can be quite the same as that.”