How to Nurture Your Unconscious Mind and Enhance Your Creativity

When you write a novel, you’re alone. Or are you? There’s you, the writer, but there’s also your subconscious, the part of your mind that churns away when you’re walking, cooking, or sleeping. When writing a novel, much of what you write is spontaneous; you generally don’t think out each sentence you write. You plan what’s going to happen, and more or less what characters will say, though even those elements of a novel sometimes seem to come out of nowhere.

Here are some ways to nurture your unconscious mind and enhance your creativity.

Why the unconscious mind is important

In The End of the Affair, the protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, is a writer in London during the Second World War. At one point, this character muses on the writing process:

So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

This describes a writer who has more or less determined the plot of a novel, and for whom the writing process is mainly one of transcription. Some writers talk about being a medium, a conduit for a story that has formed in their minds. They sketch out what is happening in a scene, a chapter, or an entire novel, and they just transcribe the thoughts that form in their heads.

When writing a scene or chapter, a writer may imagine themselves in the same situation as their characters. As they reflect on what may happen in that scene, their unconscious filters thoughts and ideas to come up with the most interesting and appropriate elements that fit the story. A meets B and talks about C, then goes to visit D; a writer may have this in mind as they write a scene, and then embellish this scaffolding with the words, actions, and thoughts of the characters, all of which the writer “makes up.” This invention is the result of thoughts in the mind of the writer who turns on a spigot to let them flow as they write.

Techniques for nurturing the unconscious

You first need to understand that your unconscious mind is a tool that you can hone and exploit when writing. To do this, you need to allow your unconscious to do its work in the background. This requires some preparation. When you’ve decided on your main characters and sketched out the plot of your novel, if you put all this aside for a while, your unconscious mind has time to mull it over. Let your mind work on problems in the background while you focus on unrelated tasks during this incubation period.

Doing this requires letting go of your intentions and becoming receptive to new ideas. Rick Rubin, in a chapter entitled “A Whisper Out of Time” in The Creative Act, says:

Boosting our receptivity may require a relaxing of effort.
If we’re trying to solve a problem, trying can get in the way.
Splashing in a pond stirs up clouds of dirt in the clear water.
In relaxing the mind, we may have greater clarity to hear the whisper when it comes.

There are many activities that can help you flip the switch to your subconscious so it does background processing. Daydreaming is a great way to allow your mind to be free, to let it flit from idea to idea. It doesn’t matter if these daydreams are about your plot or characters. Daydreaming itself is a way to flex the muscles of your unconscious mind to make it more active.

Repetitive activities, such as walking, knitting, or cleaning the house can allow your mind to wander, and ideas can spring up seemingly from nowhere when doing these activities. And I think every writer knows how ideas can arise spontaneously when taking a shower.

Working with words in different ways also gets the unconscious mind used to generating ideas. Try using a pen and paper to brainstorm; not judging ideas as you write them down, just acknowledging that these ideas may or may not be helpful to your work. You can use Scrivener’s Corkboard for this, jotting down ideas and rearranging them, adding text to the Corkboard cards. You can create a separate Scrivener project just for brainstorming, and you can combine the Corkboard with the Outliner to flesh out ideas that you then insert into your manuscript.

You can practice freewriting to generate unexpected ideas. Write quickly without your internal editor revising your thoughts. This technique can tap directly into your subconscious and allow ideas to flow freely. Don’t judge what you’ve written; this is more like doing push-ups with your mind than actual writing for your project.

It can be worth trying to allow your dreams to assist you in your writing. Before going to bed, write down a sentence or a paragraph about something you are trying to solve in your work. Think about it before you go to bed. Set an alarm so you have more of a chance to wake up in a REM sleep phase, which is when you dream, and quickly note what your dream is about. While this may not always help solve problems of plot or character, it can open your conscious mind to the vast world that plays out in your unconscious while you sleep.

The most important thing is to develop regular practices that exercise your unconscious mind. Whether it’s regular walking, daydreaming, freewriting, brainstorming, or paying attention to your dreams, you will benefit from making these activities part of your regular routine.

Your unconscious mind contains multitudes. All it takes to explore its ideas is a practice that allows you to tap into them, and to make creativity more accessible over time.