Susan Oleksiw

A friend and I co-founded a literary review in the late 1990s, which seemed to me a reasonable thing for two writers to do. Ann was a beginner and I was well established as both a mystery writer, reviewer, and editor. I saw no impediment to creating a journal publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, and black-and-white art. I loved The Larcom Review, and still consider it one of the best and most fun things I've ever done. I had no doubts about pursuing this idea, and neither did Ann. So when another writer friend asked me about it, the question stuck in my mind—until this week.
 
She asked, How did you know how to do what you did?
 
Aside from the sentence itself, which I love for its construction, I didn't know what to say. I could point to certain life experiences—working on a student humor magazine in college—writing reviews and stories for other publications, playing with a small printer as a child.  And today, after reading about advances in neuroscience, I think I understand why.
 
We have two kinds of memories, one explicit (tomorrow I'll remember typing this) and another implicit (my brain will hide from me whatever meaning or discovery it finds in this experience, holding it for whenever I need it, even though I don't know it's down there, filed away, and I probably won't recognize it when it surfaces, but I'll benefit). This isn't nearly as elegant as a scientist's explanation, but it mostly covers the ground.
 
In answer to my friend's question, I didn't know consciously how to do what I did, and I didn't know that I knew unconsciously how to do what I did. Was it body language? Like riding a bike or knowing how to braid hair or how to perform a particular dance step? Was it watching someone doing something I was curious about, recording visually a new technique without being aware of doing so?
 
When I was still editing nonfiction for various publishers, I carved out a niche in ghostwriting that involved taking a 75-page manuscript and turning it into a 250-page book. An editor once asked me how I did it, and I really couldn't answer. I could only describe what I observed myself doing. I read through the ms, and then I saw it completed in my head, and then I transcribed it by adding to the 75 pages I already had. I added sentences, extended others, added paragraphs, moved things around. When I came to a sentence that was out of context, I marked it, knowing it belonged in chapter 6 and I would place it there when I got to writing that chapter. At the end of three weeks or so, I had 250 pages of what the author would have written if he had noticed the implications of each sentence and elaborated on each one. The most I could tell the editor when she asked for clarification was that I had a ms in my head, like a roll of microfilm, and I went through it, scrolling forward and back as needed, but mostly copying down what I saw in my head. Not a single word was my original thought, and often when I stepped back to read it, I wondered why the author thought that way, but no author ever said it was wrong. If nothing else I'm very intuitive but I also absorb ideas and oddities easily when I'm interested.
 
Neuroscience has shined light on a question that has vexed me for years, and I know my latching onto this new bit of information about memory may explain only part of it. But it's enough for now, and I look forward to gleaning more from ongoing research into how the brain functions. We'll never uncover or discover all of it, but each discovery deepens my understanding of how the creative mind works, and sometimes mine in particular.
 
I know there are plenty of other writers who harbor the same curiosities about how we do what we do, so I share this and hope sometime to read how others produce their work, what they find when they look beneath the obvious outlining and conscious efforts.
 
To read more about the two types of memory, see A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, MD, Fari Amini, MD, and Richard Lannon, MD (Random House, 2000). The title does not do justice to the extensive scientific information contained within.