In A Journey into Chaos: Creativity and the Unconscious, Nancy C. Andreason explores how one's unconscious processes affect the creative process. Our brains are constantly forming connections, especially when we aren't thinking about it. Many creative people have said that ideas come to them somewhat spontaneously and that they aren't forced. For example, Archimedes had a revelation about water displacement while in the bath. He wasn't trying to have an idea, it just came to him.
For the study, Andreason explored the brain's "resting state." The brain never truly stops functioning, so she defined the resting state as a time in which the mind was allowed to wander, free from external stimuli. She found that this period of time was when the brain was most likely to be making connections as it considered things it has already experienced.
The acclaimed author Stephen King takes full advantage of this "resting state." He likens his own creative process to a wakeful yet dreamlike state. To bring himself into this state, he follows a rigid daily routine of writing in the morning. He encourages having a private place to enter this "creative sleep" and says that he must have a closed door, closed curtain, and no distractions to really allow his mind to flow freely.
On his website, he answers the question "where do you get your ideas?" by saying he sees two things come together in a new way, which is essentially what your brain is doing when you form new ideas. Many of his books are based (very loosely) on things he himself experienced, which he looks at under a new light. For example, he got the idea for the novel The Shining while he and his family were the only guests in an empty hotel, and he had a nightmare about his son being chased down the hall by a fire hydrant.
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What do you think would have inspired Stephen King to use this technique of using the resting state of his brain to get ideas to write?
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, what could be his motivations to use this state to write?
What you've described here seems to correlate with Freud's ideas nicely. Freud studied the psychology of dreams, and it is interesting to ponder what he would think of this article. Freud believed that seemingly insignificant things in dreams have great meaning, which is something that King uses in his work. Though he is awake, he enters a dreamlike state, and allows his ind to wander, similarly to what happens when we sleep. He then turns small thoughts into the basis for his stories.
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