Freud, Sigmund. "The Creative Writer and Daydreaming." 1908. The Uncanny. Adam Philips, Ed. David McClintock, trans. Penguin Group: 2003.

I was given this essay at Goddard for a workshop; it so intrigues me as possibly a link between creative writing and composition that I had to annotate it here.

Freud writes, "We laymen have always been greatly intrigued to know where the creative writer, that strange personality, finds his subjects -- which is much the same question as a certain cardinal once put to Ariosto -- and how he contrives to enthral us with them, to arouse in us emotions of which we might not even have thought ourselves capable. Our interest is only heightened by the fact tht the writer himself, when questioned, gives us no explanation, or no satisfactory explanation, and it is in no way affected by our knowledge that even the best insight into what determines the writer's choice of material and into the nature of literary composition would do nothing to make creative writers of us" (25).

I think this does much to speak of the mystification that surrounds the writing process, when even I, as a creative writer, often say I have no control of my story as I watch my fingers type it onto the page. control is the key word here; even though composition will speak of the "prewriting" and "planning" processes that should be inherent to writing, at all times it feels that composition seems to have a "handle" on the eventual final product, while creative writers will just throw up their hands and proclaim they didn't even have an outline, the work just happened.

Freud points out that the beginnings of "poetic creativity" could stem from childhood: "The child's favourite and most intense occupation is play. We may perhaps say that every child at play behaves like a writer, by creating a world of his or her own or, to put it more correctly, by imposing a new and more pleasing order on the things that make up his world. It would therefore be wrong to think that he did not take this world of his seriously; indeed, he takes his play very seriously and expends a great deal of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not seriousness -- it is reality" (25-6).

For me, this speaks of another ambiguity between composition and creative writing. Compositionists seem to take the process far more seriously, able to explain the writing process away in all its academical journals, whiel creative writers have very few published works on the creative process. We speak of craft and consider how respected authors have mastered the craft, but wwe don't seem to be able to -- or want to -- explain the process of putting together the work.This is not to say that creative writers don't take their work seriously -- we do -- we just don't seem to consider as much the process as we do the final work, and whether it is "successful."

I don't think I want to try to analyze the following quotes I also found interesting from this essay, so for now I'll just record them here in case they prove helpful to one of my works at a later time:

"When the child has grown up and ceased to play, after putting years of mental effort into understanding the ralities of life, together with all the seriousness they call for, he may one day find himself in a frame of mind in which the opposition between play and reality is once more suspended. The adult can recall the high seriousness that he once brought to his childhood games, and now, by equating his ostensibly serious concerns with these games, he throws off the all too oppressive burden of life and wins the great bonus of pleasure afforded by humour" (26).


"It may be said that those who are happy never fantasize -- only the dissatisfied. Unsatisfied desires are the motive forces behind fantasies, every fantasy being a wish-fulfillment, correcting an unsatisfactory reality" (28).

" ... the reason is that at night we are visited by desires that we are ashamed of and must conceal from ourselves, that have for htis very reason been repressed, pushed into the unconscious. Such repressed desires and their derivatives can be allowed to express themselves only in a grossly distorted form" (29-30).