Switching Brains

This summer I set off for my MFA writing workshop with a plan. I would wake early every morning to work on my new novel, and then for the rest of the day I’d write poetry. It would be a simple matter of switching hats, right?

Apparently not. I discovered it was more like switching brains. I could not seem to focus on the cause-and-effect progression of an outline and then spend the rest of the day making metaphoric leaps between rain and loneliness (or death, it often came down to death).

My first thought: it’s just me. Other writers can do this multi-genre multi-tasking, but I cannot. But then I conducted an unscientific survey of poets who also wrote novels and discovered that they’d had similar experiences. It got me thinking about process. Was there something fundamentally different in the way a writer approached a particular genre?

While it’s true, poets are forgiven for staring out windows and walking into walls whereas novelists are expected to produce, I wondered if there might be something more elemental at work.

When I looked at the technicalities of these two genres I found that poets and novelists do many similar things. Both trade in concrete imagery. Neither can get away with too many abstractions without making their readers dizzy. A skilled writer attends to language as carefully in prose as in poetry. But what about story? For the novelist story is paramount; we read to find out what will happ

en next. For the poet it is more a question of creating unusual and surprising connections between incongruent things. And yet, don’t we break our lines precisely to lead the reader’s eye onto the next one, and the next? Sort of like, hmm, storytelling?

Then I considered the act of writing itself. My best poems always begin in longhand, whereas I just get frustrated doing anything novelistic longhand. Was this where the heart of the difference lay?

In a recent article for the National Post, Andrew Coyne suggested that writing longhand engages “…the more intuitive, right-brain aspects of cognition.” (June 25, 2013) Yet when it comes to novel writing, especially in the early stages where I am right now, I tend to be a left-brain planner, working out logistics of character and plot.

Poetry critic Wu Qiao offers a metaphor that might point to the differences in process:

“When you write in prose, you cook the rice. When you write poetry, you turn rice into rice wine. Cooked rice doesn’t change its shape, but rice wine changes both in quality and shape. Cooked rice makes one full so one can live out one’s life span . . . wine, on the other hand, makes one drunk, makes the sad happy, and the happy sad. Its effect is sublimely beyond explanation.”

You can consider that quote in many ways, one being that a novelist could conceivably make enough money to eat, whereas the poets will trade their contributors’ copies for wine out of sheer desperation.

But I’m being facetious. During an MFA panel this summer on the psychology of novel writing, someone asked, “How does a novelist access the subconscious?” The questioner admitted he was working on a novel with structural issues that he didn’t know how to resolve. Intuition was telling him where to go for answers: to that right-brain cave, where the gold is buried. Poets dig there every day, but this writer was pointing to the necessity of accessing that part of ourselves for any kind of writing – and he reminded me that the processes are not all that different at heart, or at least they shouldn’t be.

Some of the poems in our group this summer were written out of paradox: after the poet had been thinking about the poem, had walked with it, made notes about it, and had then gone to sleep, puzzled and discouraged. The next morning the poem was waiting, fully formed. How does this happen? I w

ish I knew. Maybe someone drugs the internal critic every night and shuts him up, for once. Maybe the ‘boys in the basement,’ as Stephen King calls the subconscious, can only work when we quiet our churning rational mind.

When I write poetry I do a lot of walking, a lot of longhand stream of consciousness writing where I don’t worry about making sense until much later. I’m thinking now that these might be useful exercises to try for novel writing.

You’ll have to forgive me if you catch me staring out the window and walking into walls. I’m working on my novel.

Michelle Barker is the author of The Beggar King, a young adult fantasy published by Thistledown Press. Her chapbook, Old Growth, Clear-Cut: Poems of Haida Gwaii was published in 2012 by Leaf Press, and her poetry, short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary reviews. Presently she is working on her second YA novel as well as a collection of poetry related to Jack Kerouac’s techniques for spontaneous prose.

Michelle lives in Penticton, BC, with her family. Please visit her website.