On Monday, I featured the following quote from Hilary Mantel, as part of remembering the author Maggie O’Farrell has described as the “queen of literature”:

“Many kinds of writing can be done in the unabashed light of day and by a precise intellectual process, but I think fiction that has layers and depths — the kind you can read twice* — has to come from an inner location that is in some way fogged, a place that is a continuing mystery to the author. When you begin  a project you don’t want to see your whole purpose in one clear glance. You need shadows in the landscape, to keep you alert and expectant. If you know too much about a story, the work is already done, and writing it down becomes a chore. You want a story to form up secretly in the dark hours, and to surprise you at dawn by being bigger than you thought and a different shape, and perhaps of a different nature entirely.”

Megan’s question, commenting on the post, is why it speaks to me?

The initial reason is simply the way I cried “Yes!”, with air-punch, on reading it. In short, Ms Mantel’s observations resonated at a profound level. The kernel of why, I believe, resides in my view that Ms Mantel’s, “…observation is centered in, and reflects upon, the art.”

To amplify, it centers on and reflects upon the mystery of the art. The resonance comes because my own experience of the writing art is that it is, in its essence, mysterious — along the lines of Blaise Pascal’s observation that “the heart has its reasons, that reason knows not of.”

To paraphrase, my authorial experience is that “the muse-subconscious has its reasons, that the authorial conscious knows not of.” At least, not initially — in line with Hilary Mantel’s “…You want a story to form up secretly in the dark hours, and to surprise you at dawn by being bigger than you thought and a different shape, and perhaps of a different nature entirely.”

These elements of mystery and surprise are very present in my own writing, a circumstance I’ve alluded to before in posts such as “Unpredictable To Myself”, referencing an observation by the great Haruki Murakami:

“My stories are always unpredictable to myself.”

I believe what he described at the 2015 Auckland Writers’ Festival is very similar to the process Ms Mantel is discussing.

More recently, I refeatured a 2012 post “On Writing”, in which I likened the creative process to a rainforest, “teeming with growth. decay, competition, diversity and selection.” The origin of the quote is Gerald Edelman’s view on the human brain and how it works — but what all these quotes have in common and why they resonate is because they reflect my experience of the creative process.