Dreams, Drugs, and the I Ching

Hello again, my lovelies!

The other day was absolutely beautiful in London. I found that I was physically incapable of staying inside and writing while precious daylight seeped away, so instead I put on my coat and hat and gloves and boots and made the trek into the city. It was the perfect kind of winter day; cold and crisp with a pristine blue sky stretching into infinity.

I had lunch with my fiance, watched the ice-skaters outside the Museum of Natural History, and when I needed to warm up I ducked inside the V&A Museum, in South Kensington. I love museums, and the V&A is one of my absolute favorites. It combines art and textiles with history and fashion, while making them all interesting.

The V&A Museum, courtesy of me.

But as I wandered the echoing halls and admired Palissy bowls and examples of 17th century garb, I got to thinking about inspiration. No artist can really succeed at an art without some measure of inspiration, no matter its source. And writers are artists. It doesn’t matter whether we are poets or fantasy novelists or essayists or short story writers. Everyone relies on some kind of inspiration to create something wonderful. It might be fleeting and rare, or a daily pulse like a heartbeat, or disguised in songs that we hear or paintings that we see. But it’s there.

But where does inspiration come from? The answer seems to be anywhere and everywhere.

Many authors cite dreams being the inspiration behind many famous novels. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and, most famously, Twilight were all reportedly written after their authors experienced especially vivid and intense dreams. This is one that I, in particular, have a lot of experience with, although my dreams usually inspire short stories or small scenes in my books, not best-selling novels. (Keep on trying, dream-machine!)

While this is not a method of inspiring creativity that I would necessarily recommend, many prodigious authors were also drug-users. “Kubla Khan,” written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was purportedly composed after the poet experienced an opium-induced hallucination. Aldous Huxley experimented widely with mescaline and LSD, and Stephen King has admitted to using cocaine in the ’70′s and ’80′s. Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most infamous drug-addled author of all–in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his narrator alter-ego writes that he brought “two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers” on his road trip. Suffice it to say, that guy didn’t discriminate when it came to substance.

Was Aldous Huxley's invention of the drug Soma inspired by personal experience? Image via tumblr

Other writers find inspiration in methods of divination or fortune-telling. The talented Kristin McFarland writes that she was inspired to write a mystery novel after choosing a fateful Nine of Cups from a Tarot deck. And Philip K. Dick used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese form of divination, to decide almost all the plot points and character fates in his dystopian alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle.

I think most writers, though, find inspiration in the people, events, and places in their own lives. There’s a reason why the adage “Write What You Know” is parroted by every creative writing guide and teacher ever. I know that I was inspired to write my first novel Shadowkin (now in 2nd draft) when I visited Ireland for the second time when I was 19. The gorgeous surroundings and the ancient Celtic heritage was the perfect setting for a supernatural world based in Irish legend. I started my second (as yet unfinished) novel after I moved to London. I couldn’t get the idea of a steampunky Victorian paranormal adventure out of my head, and finally decided to start it during NaNoWriMo.

What about you? Do you rely on dreams, drugs or divination methods for your inspiration? Or do you find inspiration in the everyday things that surround you? Discuss in the comments!

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O Time, Thy Mirrors

The passing of time always seems thinner, somehow, this time of year. More malleable, perhaps. As though the tense intervals of the infinite cycle relax, soften, and waver as if in the soft light of a flickering fire. Yes–life seems firelit, this time of year, and the shadows lengthen and recede unpredictably in the tenuous brightness of the passage of time.

And I feel more malleable, too. I feel myself changing in small ways for small lengths of time, until the momentary glimpses I have of my own identity seem blurred, distant, and incongruous.  My perception of what is and is not me seems more clumsy than usual. I am beset by newer, unfamiliar joys and deeper, more insistent regrets. What I am and what I should be seem loosened from each other disconcertingly.

Both time and self are so often assumed to be concrete things. Time has been chopped up into smaller and smaller fragments, years and weeks and minutes and nanoseconds. Why? So that we can better understand its oh-so-linear passing. It is generally accepted that people are a certain, definable way, and can only change if acted upon by some force. There are laws of motion, so to speak. But what if time is really nothing but our own diminutive understanding of it? What if our very self is nothing but our limited understanding of it?

Some of the most interesting and compelling fiction ever written involves time slips and inverted temporal structures. One of literature’s heroes, James Joyce, wrote entire books devoid of time in the way that we usually perceive it–I dare you to pick up Finnegan’s Wake some day and make sense of it. Audrey Neiffenegger awed us all in The Time Traveler’s Wife when she made one of her protagonists a time-traveler who involuntarily shifts in and out of periods in his own life. The book I just finished, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, is delicately and cleverly plotted so that the reader steadily spirals inwards from varying temporal “directions” towards a dizzying climax.

Like a Celtic labyrinth, meant to heighten spiritual growth. Image via astrolog.com

And can you think about great characters in literature who did not have some secret skeletons in their closets of identity? Batman is a vengeful vigilante; Bruce Wayne is a debauched womanizer. Just try and tell me that guy likes himself. Young adult authors from Cassandra Clare to Stephanie Meyer to Scott Westerfeld have become adept at giving their characters psychic disabilities centered around self-loathing and issues of identity. Oscar Wilde’s eponymous anti-hero from The Portrait of Dorian Gray literally cannot look upon his portrait, because the distorted, aging, loathsome face is literally a reflection of the emptiness and wickedness of his own forsaken soul.

I was thinking about mirrors today. I think there is something primordially unsettling about staring at our own reflections in the mirror. There is something that which we do not, and perhaps cannot, recognize that perpetually fascinates us in our own reflections. Perhaps it is because of this ultimate inability to truly comprehend the depths of our own selves that we so often find ourselves staring dumbly at a reflection of our physical selves. To ponder that self as other, and to attempt to understand that the other is inimitably and inimically self, for each of us.

La Reproduction Interdit, 1937, by Rene Magritte

Often, in reading, we come across dark mirrors. Characters who may seem ridiculous, or amoral, or otherwise worthless, but upon closer inspection are actually reflections of the darkest aspects of who we are. Feste, from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is one of the classic examples of a jester whose humor is so layered and multi-faceted that he manages to both shame and inspire nearly every other character in the play. He plumbs the depths of his mourning mistress’s sorrow even as he shakes her out of her doldrums; he takes part in Maria and Toby’s tomfoolery only to show that those who assume themselves wise are often fools, even as fools can often be wise men; he holds up a mirror to Duke Orsino’s mercurial fancies and shows him that ultimately nobility is but a construct of men.

And then we have doppelgängers, paranormal doubles of living persons, who in traditional mythology were harbingers of doom and brought evil and misfortune wherever they were spied. Why would this kind of creature become so prevalent in the generative imaginary of cultures all over the world? I would guess that it comes down to a secret fear of our inner selves. We construct bitter masks from our own hatred or adoration of our secret selves, but we do not thank ourselves for the mystery that haunts us, unbidden, with its uncannily familiar spectrality.

To tie this meandering post up into something resembling a neat bow, I think we have to realize that our lives, and thus, the lives of the characters who grow out of us and reflect us, are fluid, malleable, and ultimately abstract. Our timelines, and our characters, do not need to be simple, linear, or concrete.

We are all haunted by the ghosts of ourselves, in the end.

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