Automatic Writing

 

Sometimes when I’m writing a story I experience something like a ghostly presence guiding my hand so, when I re-read what I have written, I see that my narrative has gone in an unexpected direction.  There are names I hardly remember and occurences whose origins are a mystery.  I’ve come to depend on the phenomenon and am now in the habit of setting out on a story project like an unprepared sailor putting his life in the hands of the vagaries of the weather.

 

Recently, I started to write a story about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Australia in 1954 and was surprised that it became a polemic on the machinations of a Prime Minister intent on cementing a win in a forthcoming election.

 

It’s a phenomenon called psychography or automatic writing.  The Chinese called it Fuji writing and it was used by Zen monks who were said to communicate with an ancient Taoist sage credited with the creation of the kung fu system.

 

In the west, early examples of automatic writing date back to the 16th century.  More recently practitioners might use techniques like the writer passively holding a pencil on a sheet of paper or by the planchette, a small heart-shaped device on casters and fitted with a vertical pencil.  A variation of the planchette is the Ouija board which has letters and various symbols around the edge; the planchette moves, seemingly of its own volition, pausing briefly on individual symbols to spell out a message.

 

The author, Arthur Conan Doyle suggested automatic writing occurs either by the writer’s subconscious or by external spirits and, with his wife, led an automatic writing séance with Harry Houdini. It's well-known that Conan Doyle believed in fairies so perhaps his opinion might be discounted.

 

I’ve become convinced that my automatic writing is the result of the ideo-motor effect, when I enter a mild dissociative state.  I then become a victim of auto-suggestion produced by auto-hypnotism leading to the emergence of a secondary self. 

 

Or it might be a result of my undisciplined mind.  Because I’m too disorganised or lazy to properly plan my writing, I tend to start with one or two characters and a general premise and see how it develops.  It’s not surprising  that some of my stories are wayward and take an occasional unexpected turn.

 

I hope that’s what makes them interesting.

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