In Part 1, “Muses, Demons, and Egos,” we looked at the basic structure of the human psyche and boiled things down to a simple but profound insight for writers and other creators: You are psychologically divided into two selves, the conscious and unconscious minds, but you feel yourself to be only the conscious part — a statement that’s basically a tautology, since to feel implies to feel consciously — and this means your inner life is characterized by a strange doubleness. Simply as a given, as a brute fact of irreducible psychological reality, you carry around with you the sense of being accompanied by an external presence that resides “behind” your conscious thoughts and sense of self.
Once you have a grasp on this fairly wondrous, bizarre, and universal situation, the natural question that arises is the concrete and ever-popular, “Now what?” What do we as writers actually do with this insight? How do we put it to practical and productive use?
As hinted in Part 1, the answer is found in the very nature of the differences between the dual aspects of your psyche. Each of these aspects works in its own way, and each has a proper and crucial role to play in the creative process. We put our knowledge of the psyche to practical use by learning and capitalizing on these roles. Read the rest of this entry »
