Take a Creative Writing Tip from Stephen King

How to use your unconscious mind to expand your writing ideas.

When focusing on a writing challenge and unable to find a creative solution, I turn the problem over to my unconscious mind. It’s using what Stephen King calls ‘the boys in the basement.’

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King uses “the boys in the basement” to describe that unconscious mind that is always working away under the surface. Holding all our knowledge in the conscious brain, without storing some in the unconscious, we’d soon be losing our marbles. Therefore, learning to use the two parts of my brain in tandem sounded like an excellent plan to me.

The information in the conscious brain works like tabs in a filing cabinet. Pull the tab and we open a trap door into the unconscious minds. One explanation I heard says that the brain storage area is actually millions of little filing cubicles. Everything we’ve ever been exposed to is in there somewhere.

But it may not be in any order, or even in its entirety in any one cube. And since the unconscious has no filter, the validity of the information is in question. The true and the false are all stored as fact. And it is retrieved without judgment and therefore may not be currently applicable.

Therefore, when an event occurs, we are feed everything even if it is wrong. Not realizing this can get us in trouble, especially with emotions. Anger can be triggered by a miss-match of those facts. If you know that retrieval of information is triggering your anger, you can take that nanosecond and short circuit the anger if it is no longer applicable.

Controlling anger was my introduction to this concept. The younger me was one of those stereotypical hot-tempered red-heads. Given the slightest provocation, I could shout, stomp my feet and throw things with the best of them. When I learned how and why the anger flared and realized I could sidetrack those old ideas, I had to stop acting out. And I did. Now I am a bottle-dyed red-head without a demonstrative temper. (And I like myself a lot better BTW.)

Since this process happens most of the time without our participation, why not use it deliberately? I’d say it’s kin to priming the hand-pump on…

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