Getting Around Creative Obstacles

You’re writing, composing or painting — doing any work that employs your creative intelligence — and you run into a wall. You can’t see how to proceed. What to do?

“When I hit a wall, I usually stop and do something else,” noted the singer-songwriter Carole King. “This effectively turns the problem over to my subconscious mind, which keeps working on it under the radar. When I return to the task, my subconscious has often solved the problem before my ego has time to assert control.”

King is describing a technique I‘ve used successfully throughout my writing career, and so did my friend and mentor Elleston Trevor, the British novelist who wrote “The Quiller Memorandum” and “The Flight of the Phoenix.”

Elleston advised that you forget about the project entirely and let your already-programmed unconscious mind work on the problem without flogging it.

To that end, he recommended any semi-automatic activity that would keep you busy without absorbing your attention — driving, shaving, mowing the lawn, that kind of thing. The old saying about “sleeping on the problem” taps into the same wisdom.

And then, sooner than you’d think, without conscious effort, the detour around to your creative roadblock simply appears before you.

She Had an Invisible Friend

Carole King

Hypnagogic Active Imagination, a technique developed by the psychologist Carl Jung, makes use of the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, between the realms of the conscious and unconscious minds, as a means of tapping the wisdom of the integrated self.

The singer-songwriter Carole King apparently had a spontaneous experience of something like that at a moment of crisis in her relationship with her abusive husband Rick.

Isolated and indecisive, her interest in music diminished, fearful of physical and emotional attack, she needed help. And that night in a rainy LA during the recording of her Welcome Home album, some mysterious other part of herself provided it.

“At 2:02 a.m., I awoke and saw Rick sleeping next to me,” she recalled. “I turned my head and registered the time on the clock. Then I turned my face up toward the ceiling and lay on my back, motionless. I knew who Rick was, but I couldn’t remember who I was. At that moment, if someone had asked me my name, I would have drawn a blank. Suddenly I heard someone ask a question. It might have been I, but I hadn’t spoken. It was as if I were outside myself hearing the question asked in my own mind.

“’Who am I?’

“I sat up slowly, attentively, the way people do at night when they think they’ve just heard something but aren’t sure… I stepped quietly down from the bed, and started to go … where? Where was I going? I couldn’t remember why I had gotten up.

“Suddenly my perception shifted and I was regarding myself as if through someone else’s eyes. I watched myself walk over to the window and look out. Then I saw myself turn from the window and, with a movement like that of a silk scarf slipping off a mannequin, the woman I was watching slipped down and collapsed on the rug at the foot of the bed. At that moment, she — I — curled into a fetal position and disappeared. I had no thoughts. I had nothing, and I was no one.

“Then I heard another question in my mind as clearly as if I had spoken it aloud.

“’Where’s me?’

“An answer grew out of the nothingness and shaped itself around the person I was experiencing as not-me. It wasn’t sudden, like a thunderbolt. It was an unguent, a healing sense of possibility that slowly permeated my consciousness, a balm that soothed my soul, reanimated my body, and infused my mind with a renewed sense of identity and purpose.”

She recalled her success as a songwriter, her joy as a mother and the financial independence she had won for herself. She determined, if not to leave Rick, then to seek professional help to improve their unhealthy relationship.

“With clarity and resolve, I stood up, walked to the bed, climbed in, and immediately fell asleep,” she wrote.

And that was the beginning of the end of Carole King’s abuse.

Source: “A Natural Woman” by Carole King

The Ethics of Lennon

John Lennon and Yoko Ono

“You talkin’ to me?”

And yes, Yoko Ono was talking to her, here in the women’s restroom of a cinema screening “Taxi Driver” in 1976 — “her” being singer-songwriter Carole King.

The two women hit it off, and Ono invited King and her boyfriend over after the movie, which they discovered they would therefore have to leave early.

“You’re not going to stay for the end of the movie?” King asked.

“No, we never do,” Ono replied.

The quartet slipped out of the theatre to a waiting station wagon, and — with the help of two bodyguards and John Lennon lying prone in the back — were away in less than a minute.

Relaxing in a minimalist apartment somewhere on the several floors of the Dakota owned by Lennon and Ono, King and her boyfriend had green tea and Japanese appetizers in white dishes while observing that Lennon seemed “radiantly happy.”

King’s boyfriend would ultimately prove to be abusive and possessive, and surprised King that night by explaining his survivalist plans to Lennon, something he hadn’t bothered to tell King about.

As American society collapsed, the boyfriend explained, he and King would be on their self-sufficient place somewhere deep in the woods, ready to start building a new world when the time came.

King said Lennon “…listened respectfully. When Rick finished laying out his vision for our future, John’s response revealed the innate compassion of this man who had already influenced the lives of so many people.

“’Well, now,’ John said. ‘I couldn’t do that. I’d have me bag of rice, but what about everyone else?’”

“John’s remark not only mitigated my apprehension, but touched me so deeply that for a few minutes I stopped thinking on a conscious level,” King recalled. “I remember only the purity of his compassion and how I felt it envelop me like a warm blanket. Sitting in the glow of his happiness and inner peace, I realized that if John Lennon could ignore what others were saying and live his life exactly as he wanted to with love and compassion, then so could I.”

Source: “A Natural Woman” by Carole King