Best-laid Plans...

Les Murray said this, about writing his verse novel, Fredy Neptune: A Novel In Verse:

'I never let myself plan his course, but worked always by way of surprises and discoveries. I never even knew how the poem would end till I got to that last page. And I try to keep that true in all my poems.' (O’Driscoll, D. 2005. “Interview, Les Murray: The Art of Poetry No. 89.” Paris Review 173: 39–79).

I think this is the exact same sentiment I'd give about how I'm writing my current novel. I've had some set-backs, with my time having been taken up with family issues and so on over the last few weeks, and it's been tough, but I've been reading Marcelle Freiman today (Freiman, M. 2015. A 'Cognitive Turn' in Creative Writing - Cogn

ition, Body & Imagination. New Writing: International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 2, 127–142, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1016043) and I'm interested in how that element of 'Flow' (mentioned in that article: 'As in other, fully engaged, absorbed creative activity, when one writes in a process of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1996), one can lose sense of time and place, or rather, of ‘being’ in time and place. Thomas Keneally argues that because ‘the subconscious is so powerfully at work in our books, it feels sometimes as if the influence is external’ (Woolfe & Grenville, 1993: 194); as if one is ‘out of body’, affected by something outside the writer’s self.' p128. Woolfe, S., and K. Grenville. 1993. Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels Were Written. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.) I'm hoping I can get back into the game tomorrow...