When Your Story Knows Before You Do

There are things we put in our stories without knowing why. Or at least that’s true for me.

A character’s name or outfit. A word you’ve never used before (or didn’t know was spelled that way). A minor character does or says something that feels right in the moment, then becomes a turning point fifty pages later.

You could call it instinct. If you’re feeling romantic, credit the Muse. Every so often, though, it feels as if the story has already been written and we’re just birthing it.

Steven Pressfield calls this the Muse. And he takes it seriously. Before he begins work, he recites an invocation from The Odyssey. The prayer acknowledges something he can’t completely explain. But when he shows up and writes, the rest falls into place.

I think the Muse flirts with our id so the ego can get shit done.

In Pressfield’s telling, the Muse becomes available only after the writer pushes through Resistance, the invisible, internal, and universal force that sabotages creativity, dreams, and personal growth.

OK, if that’s too woo-woo for you, can you at least admit that something strange happens when we write?

Creative thinking appears to rely on spontaneous association (ideas), deliberate judgment (choices), memory, and our ability to imagine possibilities. Since much of that activity never reaches our awareness, we get a finished connection without seeing how it formed. Ta-da! Now it’s on the page.

Incubation makes the experience stranger. You step away from a problem to wash the dishes, take a walk, or sleep. When you return the answer is right there. Research supports the incubation effect, though psychologists still debate why it works.

Maybe our breaks away from a project are like waiting for the Heinz Ketchup. IT’S SLOW GOOD.

A quick shout-out to Liz Fieser for inspiring this essay with her article, “Less Defining, More Creating.”

Whether unconscious processing continues during that time is still debated. Whatever happens, you experience the answer all at once, with no memory of building it.

Is it precognition? Perhaps, but that explanation asks us to accept something much harder to reconcile: information arriving from an event that has not happened yet. That’s a rabbit hole worth exploring on your own.

Experiments have produced results that some researchers think may be evidence of precognition. Daryl Bem’s widely discussed studies are the best-known modern example. As you can imagine, they drew heavy criticism. As of this writing, precognition has not been established as a human ability. Yet.

Now fiction creates its own illusion of information moving backward through time.

An ending changes how we understand the beginning. You discover where the story has been going, look back, and find that everything was pointing there. Maybe it’s careful outlining and the subconscious works things out for us in the background. You didn’t foresee the ending in any paranormal sense. Your mind just detected the story’s direction before your conscious mind could catch up.

As writers, we produce hundreds of details that never become important. We remember the five that later fit beautifully and forget the fifty that went nowhere. Revisions clean up the evidence until coincidence can resemble a plan. Even after accounting for that, the experience retains a little mystery.

So, if the first 20 minutes of a writing session sucks, stick with it. That may be the toll we pay to reach this magical crossroads of talent, inspiration, and instinct.