Visions When Writing: Evidence for the Haunted Abyss #2

Creative people are used to ideas dropping in out of nowhere. It's strange but familiar. Yet, really, where DO these ideas come from? And are there actually two sources?

Sometimes when I write I have bizarre experiences. Very occasionally, I find that I am writing down a scene, or an image, that I can only explain has been given to me by some kind of external force, or presence, or consciousness.

Just to set the scene: I’ve been a professional dramatist for thirty years, been writing fiction of one sort or another for forty-five years. Over that time I’ve grown deeply familiar with the process of creativity.

How ideas arrive, how they land, and what that process feels like.

I invariably recognise their source, their feel, and can always go back to memories, or influences, or books I’ve read or films I’ve seen that provided the seed.

It’s a process I well understand, and can kick into gear in a more-or-less controlled fashion.

Given Moments

Sometimes, very occasionally, things arrive in a different way. From momentary images, or descriptions of phrase, or story beats, right up to entire stories, they arrive with me with no known source.

They don’t come from anything I known or seen previously. They land, fully formed, from out of the blue.

The phrase The Haunted Abyss itself came from a chapter in a novel I wrote about a man being chased down by an obsession with the cross of Christianity. It was as if there were spirits on his tail, spirits leading him, feeding him, giving him the encounter with Christ that he couldn’t ignore.

That idea itself, hmm, it matched in some ways my own journey to faith, and I definitely mixed in material from another person’s testimony I’d heard.

But there was one short paragraph towards the end of this chapter that just appeared fully formed. I have literally no idea how I wrote it.

Towards the end of the same book I was finishing off the story of one of the more minor characters, when, from absolutely nowhere, I felt a prophecy of her life over the next fifteen years.

The book had been a very naturalistic cold-case murder investigation, but the future I saw for this woman was nothing like this.

The events I saw for her were ‘first came the new politics, then war, then survival’.

In the story I saw for her, she lasted another fifteen years, finally joining a wandering caravan of survivors and dying in a wandering community camped in the New Forest in the south of England in 2035.

(Most worryingly I wrote this in April 2020, just as lockdown began a massive assault on British civil liberties. Five years later, it seems as though we are some way into that list of events.)

Another moment came previously in the same book, so entirely trivial in one way, yet very revealing.

That same character was leaving her husband for good. As I was writing that scene, as she drove away from their house, I was suddenly looking through her eyes. She saw him in the window, waving his hands at her.

Unlike almost every scene I’ve ever written, all other reality fell away and I saw him at the window, his hands waving like limp bird wings, utterly and completely real.

I was not inventing this, or drawing it from a combination of other experiences, and viewing and synthesising a new thing; no, this man at this window was completely new, and completely real – a real event that somehow happened, somewhere, and I was just seeing it. Where and how did this come from?

Entire Story Setups

The biggest writing vision happened on a train running through dreary London suburbs.

It was a Sunday evening in winter, and the winter darkness felt heavy. The train trundled past an old pub in Tooting, or Balham, or another suburb. The pub was a Victorian building, and all the curtains upstairs were closed. But, in an instant I could see through the wall, through the curtain, into one of the upper bedrooms.

The room was was small, carved out of the attic. The door to a dark landing and the stairs down stood ajar to the back left of the vision.

A woman in her thirties sat on the bed, brushing her hair, and then a man appeared in the doorway. He was the owner of the building, and licensee of the pub, and the two of them were in an abusive relationship.

I knew soon he would hit her again, and she would take it again, and they would go on and nothing would change in the near future.

Then I knew without any doubt that this relationship had lasted years, and there was a weary comfort to it felt by both sides. Neither of them liked it much, but it was what they had, and they would go on with it.

The vision faded and more darkened London buildings rolled past and the night settled down on me.

For a week or two I considered going back to find the pub, to find the woman and find the man, just to test the accuracy of my vision, but I doubted what I had seen just enough to make that kind of trip uncompelling.

Years later I can’t forget it. What was given me at that moment wasn’t the usual daydream I recognised from creating fiction and drama. It was completely new, and completely real. I was seeing a real event that had somehow happened, in that pub, maybe some years before.

Where and how did this come from?

And then I started getting visions when I wasn’t writing. I’ll talk about that next time.