In the 1990s there was, you might remember, some buzz of excitement around the storytelling method called hypertext. Concurrent with the rise in popular culture of the internet people were experimenting with text which was written like an html webpage, with clickable links which could be chosen by the reader.
The reader's choices would determine which bit of the story they would go to next. There had been a similar thing in the 80s in the form of adventure books where the next scene in the story was decided by the roll of some dice.
So I believe that all of the stories we might want to tell are a kind of hypertext in our subconscious but they are fragments and ideas and rough versions of scenes or sketches of possible interactions between characters.
When we do the archaeology thing of unearthing these fragments we also do the artist thing of deciding how they should be put together. It's a combination of unearthing and creating, rather than one or the other.
There's a beautiful Monty Python animation where the giant foot comes down out of the sky, stamps the ground and then breaks apart into fragments. Geological eras go by and the fragments of the foot are buried. Then archaeologists come and dig up the big toe.
They reconstruct the creature they imagine the toe must belong to and exhibit their reconstructed dinosaur in a museum. The big toe is now the creature's nose.
So I think we are digging in our conscious and subconscious minds to unearth bits and pieces of stories but we can choose how we want to put those pieces together.
After reading about the richly detailed past lives people can invent under hypnosis, I got to wondering if that would be a good way to create the raw material for a historical novel. Get myself put under, told to go back to the period of the planned novel, then record whatever story I cooked up and use it as my story treatment when writing. I mentioned this notion to my wife and she turned it into a much more original story concept. (My Memories of a Future Life, in case you're interested to take a look.)
Never underestimate the brain's powers when it comes to real-time confabulation, be it from hypnosis, stroke or dementia. I was hypnotised in a medical school evening lecture to demonstrate this in ~1988. I quite happily prattled on about living on Mars and answered/deflected audience questions from fellow students aimed at derailing my earnest, highly amusing delusions. I even spoke in Martian and acted as a translator for another hypnotised subject. It remains an unforgettable hour, but it clearly demonstrated how individuals can spontaneously generate a whole fantasy world with only a few prompts. Children do it all the time, of course. Any experiment along the lines you suggest would require careful construction to detect and remove this effect. It may well prove impossible to do so.
For what it's worth, I trained in hypnotherapy years ago (I haven't practised for a long time). Hypno can induce a state that allows greater access to the subconscious. The idea that complete novels are 'hidden' in our minds, failing to escape into the world because our conscious mind puts up barriers, is tempting.
Sometimes we seek a solution to a problem, go to sleep, and wake up the next morning with the answer e.g. the solution to a plot hole. In theory, we could carry a complete novel in our subconscious, but in reality?
I've experienced the inverse of this - my imagination pops an idea into my consciousness at an inconvenient time and I don't make a note, convinced I'll remember it later (flying in the face of all previous experience).
I've had two MRI scans, and both times, I've tried to think of nothing at all, because I'm worried my thoughts might somehow show on the scan. Like - "that bit of the brain has lit up. How dare they think about that inside the scanner!"
As to what novels are in there - I agree with you entirely. Bits of it are there, but the whole thing isn't. It needs to be put together.
In the 1990s there was, you might remember, some buzz of excitement around the storytelling method called hypertext. Concurrent with the rise in popular culture of the internet people were experimenting with text which was written like an html webpage, with clickable links which could be chosen by the reader.
The reader's choices would determine which bit of the story they would go to next. There had been a similar thing in the 80s in the form of adventure books where the next scene in the story was decided by the roll of some dice.
So I believe that all of the stories we might want to tell are a kind of hypertext in our subconscious but they are fragments and ideas and rough versions of scenes or sketches of possible interactions between characters.
When we do the archaeology thing of unearthing these fragments we also do the artist thing of deciding how they should be put together. It's a combination of unearthing and creating, rather than one or the other.
There's a beautiful Monty Python animation where the giant foot comes down out of the sky, stamps the ground and then breaks apart into fragments. Geological eras go by and the fragments of the foot are buried. Then archaeologists come and dig up the big toe.
They reconstruct the creature they imagine the toe must belong to and exhibit their reconstructed dinosaur in a museum. The big toe is now the creature's nose.
So I think we are digging in our conscious and subconscious minds to unearth bits and pieces of stories but we can choose how we want to put those pieces together.
After reading about the richly detailed past lives people can invent under hypnosis, I got to wondering if that would be a good way to create the raw material for a historical novel. Get myself put under, told to go back to the period of the planned novel, then record whatever story I cooked up and use it as my story treatment when writing. I mentioned this notion to my wife and she turned it into a much more original story concept. (My Memories of a Future Life, in case you're interested to take a look.)
Love this idea. I'd be totally up for being hypnotised to find out where my novel wants to go, because I believe it's all in there somewhere.
Loved this. I have never been hypnosable either, is that is a weird, but now I somehow world want it to see if I know where my story goes…
Oh wow, that comment has been mangled by autocorrect to an extent that I can hardly see what I meant myself 😄
Never underestimate the brain's powers when it comes to real-time confabulation, be it from hypnosis, stroke or dementia. I was hypnotised in a medical school evening lecture to demonstrate this in ~1988. I quite happily prattled on about living on Mars and answered/deflected audience questions from fellow students aimed at derailing my earnest, highly amusing delusions. I even spoke in Martian and acted as a translator for another hypnotised subject. It remains an unforgettable hour, but it clearly demonstrated how individuals can spontaneously generate a whole fantasy world with only a few prompts. Children do it all the time, of course. Any experiment along the lines you suggest would require careful construction to detect and remove this effect. It may well prove impossible to do so.
For what it's worth, I trained in hypnotherapy years ago (I haven't practised for a long time). Hypno can induce a state that allows greater access to the subconscious. The idea that complete novels are 'hidden' in our minds, failing to escape into the world because our conscious mind puts up barriers, is tempting.
Sometimes we seek a solution to a problem, go to sleep, and wake up the next morning with the answer e.g. the solution to a plot hole. In theory, we could carry a complete novel in our subconscious, but in reality?
I've experienced the inverse of this - my imagination pops an idea into my consciousness at an inconvenient time and I don't make a note, convinced I'll remember it later (flying in the face of all previous experience).
I've had two MRI scans, and both times, I've tried to think of nothing at all, because I'm worried my thoughts might somehow show on the scan. Like - "that bit of the brain has lit up. How dare they think about that inside the scanner!"
As to what novels are in there - I agree with you entirely. Bits of it are there, but the whole thing isn't. It needs to be put together.