Author and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. explains the idea of archetype as a “predisposition that contributes to our personality, helping define our strengths, difficulties, and meaning.”

She says the common forms “are based on the gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. People are complex, there is a pantheon of these archetypes in each of us. They act from within us, and the more we know of them, the more conscious we can be about ourselves, the better.” [She is author of Gods in Everyman; her quotes are from myth & story : page 2]

Jennifer Van Bergen – exploring a whole secret life

In her article Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen writes about exploring these “underlying pre-existent patterns, or archetypes, in people’s behaviors and actions. Eventually, you see not simply the behaviors themselves but an entire ‘secret life’ going on, and from that you begin to discern a whole ‘invisible world’ where these secret lives interact, interweave, and form into stories.”

She says by “working at the archetype level.. your writing will never be the same.”

Her book Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious, according to summary by the Writers Store, notes it provides a step-by-step method, using specific exercises and coupled with detailed, in-depth explanations of the meaning of each step, to enable writers to find the characters they already contain within themselves but do not know exist or know how to access or develop.

Carl Jung

Archetypes, as the Wikipedia entry says, “have been present in mythology and literature for hundreds of years. The use of archetypes to analyze personality was advanced by Carl Jung early in the 20th century.

“The value in using archetypal characters in fiction derives from the fact that a large group of people are able to unconsciously recognize the archetype, and thus the motivations, behind the character’s behavior.”

The valuable shadow

Jung also developed ideas about exploring and using our personal shadow – “the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.”

He said the shadow “also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.”

Many writers and other artists realize how valuable it can be to explore and make use of these concepts of archetypes and the shadow self.

Another book on this topic is Psychology for Screenwriters, by William Indick, PhD.

[In her Amazon.com review, Rev. Marie Jones writes: "For any writer struggling to create powerful and believable characters, it is imperative that you understand the psychological aspects of why people do the things they do, why they behave in the ways they choose to, and what inner drives propel them towards potential greatness. The hero's journey talked about in myth and story has a structure based upon archetypes, themes and patters of human behavior that any writer can come to master when creating the perfect screenplay, and this book by screenwriter and Assistant Professor of Psychology William Indick is a priceless guidebook for navigating the interior of the mind."]

Wes Craven – consciousness is painful

For example, director Wes Craven (the image at top is from his movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984) said in an interview that during the years while writing the film, he was reading “a lot of Eastern sort of esoteric knowledge. There’s a Russian philosopher who wrote about levels of consciousness and equated consciousness with being awake – which I did throughout this picture.

“His theory was that consciousness is painful. To know really what’s true, to know the truth in any given situation, is painful, often uncomfortable, and it’s not pleasant. So most of us, most of the time, will go out what he called ‘doors.’ He listed sex, eating, sleeping, being out in a crowd; today you could add television and drugs. Those things ease the pain of consciousness.”

Craven adds that the hero – an archetypal figure – is “the person that remains conscious, remains awake, up to the point where it’s so painful you want to kill yourself. Most people, if they get near that level, turn around and go the other way; some people actually kill themselves, and some people break through to a sort of clarity where they’re truly conscious. That became the framework for the film.” [Quotes from page the shadow self : page 3]
~~

archetypes for writers, writing book, writing and the unconscious, use myths for personal growth

The film Pan’s Labyrinth was acclaimed for its powerful story and richly beautiful as well as terrifying images.

Writer and director Guillermo del Toro once commented, “When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.”

In an interview, del Toro spoke about humans having two levels of thought: “One is conscious and the other unconscious or subconscious…

“Our problem is that we divide things that may be instinctive and collective and we have compartmentalized our perception so strongly that we only get them in glimpses and I think this is where the idea of the Jungian archetype comes to work…

“I believe that there is a whole dimension that I wouldn’t call supernatural but ‘supranatural,’ that I believe in.” [From San Francisco Bay Guardian interview.]

Steve Martin on writing vs editing

Another film writer, as well as actor, Steve Martin thinks “The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you’re writing from your subconscious, is beautiful — it’s thrilling. When you’re editing, which is your conscious mind, it’s like torture. And I’ve just kind of decided that anytime it’s torture, I want to stop. I’ll just put it down and wait until it becomes not torture.” [NY Times, 8.8.99]

Writing takes place in the subconscious

In her book Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen affirms that “Writing takes place in the subconscious. Some people view the subconscious as merely a dumping ground for stuff the conscious mind cannot or does not want to handle.

“Others consider that the subconscious only exists for people who have ‘problems.’ They think that if you are healthy, your subconscious will just fall into line with your conscious mind. Neither of these ideas is true.”

She adds, “The subconscious actually operates – in everyone – as an independent mind. It perceives, processes, and retains things that never enter the conscious mind at all.”

“We all have material in the subconscious. In fact,it is where nearly all our material is found, but that material cannot gather itself together, emerge, and become part of a work of art (or our life) unless the conscious mind allows it.”

Her book provides concrete information and exercises for, as she puts it, “doing archetypes” – not the “usual writing skills, but rather distinct, separate non-writing skills that, together, enable one to do ‘one’s own writing,’ and to access and develop one’s existing characters, and, ultimately, to write them in the context of their real lives (stories).”

Also see her article Archetypes for Writers, and my post Dancing with our unconscious.

Intuition integrates conscious and unconscious

Being creative and realizing our talents as an artist or any identity we want to be involves self-awareness and respecting who we really are, including our unconscious depths.

Brain/mind researcher Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler notes in her article Your Intuitive Intelligence that intuition is a “whole brain” function, and “draws upon both our higher mind, and our entire lifetime of experience stored in the subconscious mind. It’s probably our most powerful method of integrating our conscious and subconscious thought processes.”

Many writers and other artists attribute creative thinking and inspiration to the subconscious.

The book Sparks of Genius, among many other sources, talks about “those pre-logical glimmerings sensed amid the noise of formal thinking that intuitively synthesize an insight before it is translated into words, dance, music, math, pictures, whatever.” [Kirkus Reviews]

In his article Writers Thrive On Anxiety, hypno-psychotherapist Dr. Bryan Knight declares that hypnosis can help writers in a number of ways – including “releasing the creative power of the subconscious.” [From my article Can Hypnosis Enhance Creativity?]

Going to the cave

Author Steve Pavlina writes about “going to his cave” and becoming immersed in creative writing projects:

“For some reason these periods of intense concentration tend to reduce my need for sleep, much like doing an extended meditation. … I’ve never been into drugs, but I have to imagine there are drugs that could induce something similar to this state of being.

“In many ways it feels like my conscious mind goes on a trip. I lose awareness of my physical senses and become lodged in a reality somewhere beyond the physical universe, a world of pure thought and ideas.”

From his article My Experience of Creativity.

~~

archetypes for writers, writing from your subconscious, writers inner life, writing book

“It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared.

“As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”

A need for persistence and resilience to succeed

Writer Rachel Simon notes, “Tenacity has always been a primary theme in the lives of successful writers: some historians believe that Plato rewrote the first sentence of The Republic fifty times; Virgil needed ten years to write the Aeneid; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which itself required five years of work, was not even begun until Flaubert had written, and discarded, two other novels;

“James Joyce’s Ulysses took eight years to write, and countless rejections to get published; Ernest Hemingway rewrote the final page of A Farewell to Arms almost forty times…”

She adds that Ted Solotaroff “says in his essay that Bobbie Ann Mason submitted twenty stories to The New Yorker before one was accepted; Solotaroff adds that Raymond Carver wrote for almost ten years before his first story appeared in print, then persevered another seven before publishing his first book; Harold Brodkey’s first novel, Runaway Soul, took thirty-one years of revision between its 1960 book contract and its 1991 publication.

“These are just a few of the better-known examples, but every author, even the most obscure, has his or her own stories of tenacity.”

From The Writer’s Survival Guide: Chapter 3: The General Antidotes, by Rachel Simon [posted on her site]

Refining creative talent

“To be successful and high achieving takes inborn talent”; “Talent will out”; “You need a gift to be exceptional” – all these are myths, according to research detailed by Geoff Colvin in his book Talent Is Overrated.

These preconceptions also fuel a sense of inadequacy, lower esteem or decreased self-efficacy for many people, and distorted beliefs that we need to be “special” to reach high levels of excellence and achievement. From my post Outstanding gifted adults: Geoff Colvin on why Talent is Overrated.

Here is a related post: Grit and perseverance mean more than talent and high aptitude.

Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book Outliers that to master any skill requires about 10,000 concentrated hours. From my post Outliers and developing exceptional abilities.

Dani Shapiro writes further on endurance and the writer’s inner life in her essay A writing career becomes harder to scale:

“Every single piece of writing I have ever completed — whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review — has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.”

Noting there is so much pressure on the writer to sell and make an impact in the marketplace, she asks “How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

“Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff’s essay: ‘Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness.’”

She adds, “The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we’d do it all over again if we had to.

“And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves.

“But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding — that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.”

[Image:  George Orwell chose to write Nineteen Eighty-Four while living in Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse on the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. From my post Places to be Creative.]

self concept as artist, artist stereotypes, developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type, psychology of creativity

One teenager who wrote a three-volume novel on her phone has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies, grossing more than $611,000 in sales.

By Yuriko Nagano, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Tokyo

Photo: “Bunny,” a 15-year-old cellphone novelist, tapped out a three-volume bestseller. The teen, shown at a Tokyo train station, does not want even friends to know of her publishing success, with 110,000 paperback copies of her novel sold since it was published in May.

She likes Care Bears, doesn’t wear makeup yet, and took her nom de plume from a character in the Disney classic “Bambi.”

And last year, 15-year-old “Bunny” became one of Japan’s top authors of a genre called keitai — cellphone — novels.

After getting its start as a tale told on tiny cellular screens, her three-volume novel “Wolf Boy x Natural Girl” has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies since its release in May, according to Starts Publishing Co.

he “Wolf Boy” author, who took her alias from Thumper’s friend Miss Bunny, started writing when she was in the sixth grade, after her parents bought her a cellphone. “I was so excited,” she says with a shy smile.

Bunny was using her phone mainly to text friends until she saw a TV ad about a keitai novel website that allowed users to write novels on cellphones for free. Inspired by some of the novels she read, Bunny took a crack at one herself, simply following the word limit of 1,000 characters per page.

Keitai writers can choose to “publish” their online content immediately or keep it unlisted. Most writers upload the content as they finish so they get instant feedback from the readers, who access the stories on the website and click through the pages.

Authors respond to readers by correcting errors and, in some cases, altering story lines.

The prize for the occasional most-read story is getting your novel into print.

Over the course of several months, Bunny tapped away in her bedroom, in between homework assignments. “Wolf Boy” ended up as a high-school love story between shy, pretty Miku and tall, handsome Shun, who is generally a gentlemen except when Miku is around (thus the name “Wolf Boy”).

One scene, from Shun’s point of view, is typical of the style:

“I changed into a suit for the party. . . . When I stepped out of my room . . . Miku was there. Miku was in a pink one-piece dress, wearing white heels. She looks mature because her hair is lightly curled. She’s looking straight at me. It’s hard to keep my cool when she’s looking at me like that.”

“Wolf Boy” became one of the most popular novels on the No-ichigo website. Unaware of her daughter’s work, Bunny’s mother was floored when she first heard about a pending book offer.

“I had no idea,” her mother says.

“Wolf Boy” has grossed more than $611,000.

Continued: Los Angeles Times February 9, 2010

cellphone novel, keitai, learning writing, successful writing, success as writer, developing creativity, becoming a writer

See a video below.

He writes of one iconic film: “The cute blond starlet, looking for her missing friend, opens a creaking door. She walks down a dark hall. And we’re thinking, Don’t go there! Don’t go there!

“And then the maniac in the hockey mask lunges out from a dark corner, brandishing a chain saw. You jump and I jump and all the people around us jump.

“Yet you and I and all of us know deep down that the blond and the maniac are just light flickering on a screen. We still jump—why?”

[The photo is Jessica Biel in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). Another actor in the film, Erica Leerhsen, had an interesting comment: "My biggest fear would be life... or definitely, myself. I think that's at the core of most horror movies or even movies like The Wizard of Oz. You think you have to go through this thing, but you end up having to face yourself."]

Holland comments on another primal story:

“Seeing Casablanca for the umpteenth time, we come to the final scene. Will Humphrey Bogart put Ingrid Bergman, the woman he loves, on the plane with her heroic but dull husband who needs her?

“Every time I wonder, though I know perfectly well he will.

“Since Aristotle, people thinking about literature have encountered such psychological puzzles. But literary theorists from earlier times have faced the limitations of the psychology of those earlier times.

“Only in the last century have we had a ‘scientific’ psychology. Only in the last few decades have we had a neurology with which we can observe actual brain systems.”

Book: Literature and the Brain, by Norman N. Holland.

Sites related to Norm Holland:

IPSA (the Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts).

PSYART, the online discussion group for the psychology of the arts.

Some related Talent Development Resources pages:

The shadow self

Myth and story

neuropsychology and art, developing creativity, psychology of creativity, creative mind, brain and creativity

In an interview, Natalie Goldberg talked about writing to access your energy and creative intuition :

A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is faster than the hand — and doing timed writing exercises.

The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for your inner editor to come in.

I consider writing an athletic activity: the more you practice, the better you get at it. The reason you keep your hand moving is because there’s often a conflict between the editor and the creator.

The editor is always on our shoulder saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t write that. It’s no good.” But when you have to keep the hand moving, it’s an opportunity for the creator to have a say.

All the other rules of writing practice support that primary rule of keeping your hand moving. The goal is to allow the written word to connect with your original mind, to write down the first thought you flash on, before the second and third thoughts come in.

Because that’s where the energy is. That’s where the alive, fresh vision is, before society, which we’ve internalized, takes over and teaches us to be polite and censor ourselves.

Another way of putting it is that you need to trust what intuitively comes through you, rather than what you think you should be writing. What comes through you arises from a much larger place than that of the editor, the critic, or society.

From interview article Keep The Hand Moving, Genie Zeiger The Sun.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg  (Paperback)

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within – audiobook

Natalie Goldberg audio clip below is from Writing Down the Bones [speech]

..

Initially, when you start writing, or at least when I started writing, you think the reward is, wow! It’ll be so great to see my words on screen, to see my name on screen…

I think what happens over time when, because you’re a writer – especially once I became a screenwriter – you’re very powerless as a screenwriter.

And what happens – and it’s a subtle change, but I think it’s the one that most mature writers go through – is the gratification becomes personal… the process of writing becomes its own reward… you tell the story the way you want to tell the story, and then hope for the best…

The frustration, I think, boils down to the fact that I believe screenwriters are the most crucial aspect of a movie, and they’re the ones with the least power and the least control.

Continued in article Therapist to the Hollywood Stars.
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writers inner life, dennis palumbo, screenwriters challenges, psychology of writers

Entertainment has come to mean junk. But its definition also should include everything pleasurable that arises from an encounter with literature.

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.

It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a “Street Fighter” machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade.

Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation.

It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs.

Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you — bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.

But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted — indeed, we have helped to articulate — such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.

The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.

From longer essay: Let me entertain you, By Michael Chabon, LA Times

Excerpted from his book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands [Source of the image].
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Michael Chabon, entertainment psychology, reading for entertainment

From Diablo Cody’s Tips for Blogging Your Way to Hollywood Success, By John Scott Lewinski, Wired magazine site:

“One of my teachers told me that I was lazy,” Cody explained. “He said, ‘I think you’re the best writer I’ve ever taught. But I’ll never hear from you again because you have no ambition.’

“I never intended to get my writing out there. I always thought of published writers as honor roll students — the real overachiever types. I never intended my work as a springboard to anything else. I write because I’m addicted to it. It’s my confessional.”

“There are so many talented people that exist in the marketplace,” Cody said. “So, don’t look for a plan. Put your blog out into the world and hope that your talent will speak for itself.”

~ ~ ~

From The Oprah Winfrey Show:

Diablo says Juno is based somewhat on herself, like the hamburger phone in Juno’s room. When [her mother] Pam first saw the phone, she says it made her cry. “[Diablo] had a hamburger phone at home, and I used to see her on it all the time, and she used to shake it because it wouldn’t work properly,” Pam says.

Oprah says she thinks Juno is the movie to see this year. “How did you get it to be so fresh?” she asks. “I don’t know,” Diablo says. “I guess, you know, when you’re coming from the middle of the country and you’re not part of the industry and you’re just telling your own story, I think it’s easy to be more original.”

~ ~ ~

From Diablo Cody’s MySpace blog, January 31, 2008

I get asked a lot why I’ve chosen to be so confessional as a writer. I’ve publicly documented aspects of my life that most people wouldn’t reveal to their shrink, spouse, girlfriend, or partially deaf Dachshund.

The stuff that polite folks confine to the pages of padlocked journals, I’ve treated as a matter of open discussion. … When you possess the courage — or blunt, gourd-smacking stupidity — to be totally candid, you silently amass thousands of allies.

It’s the “me too” effect. As Steven Morrissey (Esq., Demigod) says, there is no such thing in life as normal. And if you walk around pretending to be normal, hiding your scars and incisions and putrescing wounds, you only further the Conspiracy of Normal, which exists to make us all feel like shit.

I ain’t having that. I refuse to act like I have it together, because I don’t.

~~~~~

Also, see short video of conversation between Cody and ‘Juno’ star on The Inner Actor site: Compromising yourself – Ellen Page: I’d rather be shot in the foot.
~~

screenplays by women, diablo cody, writing ambition, writing honestly

Depression hit Rowling when her first marriage to a television journalist broke down after just two years.

She had moved to Portugal to teach English and gave birth to her first daughter Jessica.

She said: “I’d had a short and quite catastrophic marriage. I had to get my baby back to Britain and re-build us a life and adrenaline kept me going.

“It was only when I came to rest it hit me what a complete mess I had made of my life. That hit me quite hard. We were as skint as you can be without being homeless and at that point I was definitely clinically depressed.

“That was characterized by a numbness, a coldness and an inability to believe you will feel happy again. All the color drained out of life.”

Afraid for her daughter

Rowling hit an all-time low when she convinced herself something awful was destined to happen to her two-year-old daughter. She said: “I loved Jessica very very much and was terrified something was going to happen to her.

“I’d gone into that very depressive mind set where everything has gone wrong so this one good thing in my life will now go wrong as well.

“It was almost a surprise to me every morning that she was still alive. I kept expecting her to die. It was a bad bad time.”

Revisiting the scene film crews took Rowling back to the flat a few miles from Edinburgh where she overcame depression by writing first novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Where the healing began

Tears began to flow as she walked into the small lounge room where she first put pen to paper.

She said: “This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life changed so much in this flat. I feel I really became myself here. Everything was stripped away. I’d made such a mess of things.

“I just thought I want to write so I wrote the book. What was the worst that could happen? It could get turned down by every publisher in Britain. Big deal.”

From article: J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and Depression.

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Depression and Creativity
Depression articles……..
Depression relief products / programs……
Depression books
Depression bookmarks
Nurturing mental health : writing
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J.K. Rowling and depression, depression and writing, depression relief products, depression books