Charles Baxter on the Many Parts of the Writer’s Mind

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Charles Baxter about his new craft book, Wonderlands.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: When I read craft books, I think a lot about seventh grade when I read “To Build a Fire” and learned about man versus nature and all the literary concepts. And I thought, was the writer really thinking about man versus nature when he wrote the story? You talk about Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 in Wonderlands. Murakami puts these little people in the book, and he said it was totally random how he put them in.

So, my question is, when we as writers look back in a more analytical way, and think about craft and write about craft, we’re putting all of this meaning into things. But then there’s the creative process, and are these people really thinking about all this? Was Shakespeare really thinking about the request moment? Was Shirley Jackson really thinking about a zombie narrative where a tradition is going on where the characters don’t even know why we’re doing it anymore, but they still grab rocks and throw them at someone?

Charles Baxter: The way I’ve come to think about this is that writing workshops and MFA programs are based on a bit of a fallacy, and I say, just a bit of a fallacy. And the fallacy is that when we’re working on fiction, our minds are almost entirely conscious of the means that we are using to get the stories down on paper. In other words, when you say, is Shakespeare really thinking about, let’s say, ambition, with Macbeth? Or in King Lear, is he thinking about inheritance and love and so on? I think the answer is that actually when we are writing, all parts of our minds are engaged in solving the problems that we have set ourselves in the novel or the story, which means that yes, there is a conscious part of your mind that is at work on the story—but there is an equal part of your mind that you’re in some sense not as aware of that is also trying to solve the problems that you have set up for yourself in telling a particular story.

For me, that’s the part of the mind that gives us dreams. It’s the part of the mind that, let’s say you’re at a party, and you see somebody at the party, and you say, I know who that is, but I can’t remember that person’s name. And your mind goes to work trying to remember the person’s name, but you yourself are not conscious of how the mind is trying to retrieve that name. The mind is doing it somehow. I don’t think anybody has ever satisfactorily described how the mind goes about retrieving things. I don’t think anybody has really been able to say how the mind goes about writing a story in which both your conscious intentions and your unconscious intentions are in collaboration.

Murakami has been asked, what are the little people doing in your novel, and Murakami has to answer, I don’t know. They came to me. How did they come to you? I don’t know. But when I was writing, they were there. And composers and painters will say very similar things. Why is that interrupting your Sonata? I don’t know. It just came to me. So yes, the writer is thinking, but all of the parts of the writer’s mind are at work. 

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Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories. Baxter lives in Minneapolis. His new craft book is Wonderlands.