What Is Your Subconscious Telling You To Write?

Mind-blowing insights from an old Cormac McCarthy interview

Last week, I was mindlessly flicking through Twitter when I stumbled across this clip from an old Cormac McCarthy interview. I highly recommend watching the entire thing.

Side note - Does anyone know where to find the full interview?  My searches have yielded no results.

McCarthy says “The sense of the subconscious and its role in your life is just…something you can’t ignore.”  He goes on to give multiple examples of scientists and artists who labored for a long time on a project, to no avail, only to have the answer presented to them in a dream or a sudden flash of insight.  The point he’s trying to make is that the subconscious is always working on something, even when you’re not, and you never know when it’s going to tell you what it’s found.

I recently posted an essay, titled SNL And The Irrelevance Of Legacy Media, that is far and away the most quantitatively successful post I’ve ever had on Substack. But that’s not the important part.  Nobody cares about the minor wins of an unknown writer.  What is important is the way I came to the idea for the piece, the manner in which I wrote it, and how I believe they relate to its ultimate success.

A few weeks ago, while walking home from work, I was suddenly struck with an idea.  I wanted to write about Saturday Night Live and how its failure to properly satirize our political climate was emblematic of the failures of legacy media as a whole.  I don’t know where this idea came from.  I wasn’t thinking about SNL or the media at all.  I remember telling my wife how bad I thought Maya Rudolph’s Kamala impression was a couple days prior, but that’s about it.  

But once I got the idea in my head, I couldn’t let it go.  I jotted a few notes down on my phone and walked the rest of the way home to spend the evening with my wife and dog.  I woke up early the next morning and knocked out the entire first draft in under an hour.  

Unlike other pieces where I had to slog through the mental muck to finish, this one was breathtakingly easy.  The words flowed, there was no resistance at all.  I remember noticing that the physical sensations of writing just felt different this time around.  There was a lightness and exuberance that I typically don’t experience when writing.  

Throughout the rest of my day at work, I would revisit the piece for a few minutes at a time, tweaking a handful of words here and there.  I normally don’t do this.  I like to keep creative work and “work” work separate.  But I was compelled to continue coming back to it.  It almost felt beyond my control.  The best word I could use to describe the experience is possessed.

I worry that I’m not explaining this very well, but then again this sort of thing might not be conducive to easy explanation.  How do you use words to describe doing or making something that doesn’t seem to come from your conscious mind?  Whatever McCarthy was talking about in that video, I feel like I experienced it, and that’s why the piece resonated.

That wasn’t my first experience with this kind of phenomena.  I remember when I was starting out as a stand-up comedian in Washington, DC, way back in 2009, all of my best jokes came to me while I was driving.  The jokes that sprung to mind when I was behind the wheel usually outperformed the jokes I came up with when I was sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper. My brain was preoccupied with the mechanics of navigating and driving, creating a perfect opportunity for my subconscious to take over and deliver what my conscious mind couldn’t.  When I moved to New York a few years later, the fact that I couldn’t drive anymore was a major blow to my creative output.  There were no windows of time for my subconscious to make itself heard.

All of this makes me wonder, is it possible to bring the insight of the subconscious to the forefront with greater frequency?  I understand that you have to be disciplined and consistent with your work habits so that when the insight comes you’re in position to ride the wave and capitalize on it.  But might there be a way to regularly summon or dive into it?  Or are we just prone to its whims, with no influence over when or where it appears?  This video of Bob Dylan, talking about why he can no longer write the kind of songs he used to, makes me worry that it’s the latter.

I’m not quite sure where to go from here.  I know I have a very consistent work ethic with my writing, so I’ll be ready to take dictation from my subconscious whenever it decides to appear.  I just wish it would show up more often.  I want more experiences like I had with the SNL piece.  Writing under those circumstances was, simply put, so enjoyable.

If you have any tips or tricks for calling the subconscious forward, drop them in the comments.  I’ll probably end up trying them all.