My friend, Angel, sent me a link to a Guardian piece in which Brian Aldiss, author of Brothers of the Head (”the 1977 novel about conjoined twins who are exploited as a pop act [which] has now been made into a film”) looks at “the question of where creative ideas emerge from.”

Aldiss writes:

It’s all wrapped up with the mystery of human consciousness, which has yet to be resolved. We employ the word “inspiration” without fully understanding what it means. In the brain is a wordless corner where a lost thing forces its way up into the light, into music or pictures or speech. Sometimes an idea will creep up on you, and sometimes you have to creep up on it.

Prior to getting Angel’s email and reading this I was pottering about in my harddrive’s miscellany and came across a quote I’d saved from a Missouri Review interview with Annie Proulx. In it she said:

Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure—a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind. I spend a year or two on the research and I begin with the place and what happened there before I fill notebooks with drawings and descriptions of rocks, water, people, names. I study photographs. From place come the characters, the way things happen, the story itself. For the sake of architecture, of balance, I write the ending first and then go to the beginning.

Aldiss then refers to a book called The Dynamics of Creation written by Anthony Storr in which Storr maintains that “some creative people seem to have only a tenuous sense of their own identity.” Aldiss quotes: “Indeed, their work may be an expression of their search for identity.” Could be. Who was it that said I write to discover what I know? Or something like that.

Meanwhile, I found, (online sometime ago, some call - by Kaialsh C. Baral - for academic papers on Coetzee that woul make up a volume of essays on his work) some notes on Coetzee’s fictions and and narrative voice, that Coetzee’s novels are written in the “middle voice.” That is, Coetzee’s writings are self-referential, he writes in reference to the self. Fiona Probyn, in her online essay, cites various sources:

…self-reflexive writing is an example of Coetzee’s strategy of ‘writing in the middle voice,’ which he has described in this way: “[t]o write (middle) is to carry out the action (or better, to do writing) with reference to the self” …[the] phenomena of the ‘middle voice,’ which is a writing position between the ‘active’ (such as in the declaration “I write”) and the passive (”it is written”).

But now I’ve gone from creative inspiration to creative process. It’s all a jumble in my head. Back to the Guardian story. Aldiss said that when he was younger he always thought he would die after finishing a novel.

I’m scared I’ll die before. (Which is any day now as I’m almost, almost done revising for the nth time!)
Whatever happens the present is, as my friend Wendy once told me, very much like Fuseli’s nightmare.