Automatic Writing, sometimes also referred to as Unconscious Writing, is a creative writing method. In this session, hold by Gabrielė Labanauskaitė from Vilnus/Lithuania during the Alexandria Nova Online-Symposium in May 2020, Gabrielė will show us different ways to approach Automatic Writing and talk about how to challenge yourself in doing so.
Gabrielė is writer and drama narrative researcher. One of her great passions of her is exploring storytelling in any kind of form and teaching creative writing.
It came from the surrealistic field when Freud uncovered that we have not only consciousness but also unconsciousness. The artists were very interested in exploring this in different ways and share their unconsciousness.
Gabrielė Labanauskaitė
Enjoy the intro from the Alexandria Nova Zoom Session by Gabrielė Labanauskaitė:
After the first steps of Automatic Writing, Gabrielė recaps the process and reflects the difficulties between rational and impulsive creative processes. As she says in the beginning, the process is “full of oppositions”, but as we see later on, there are endless possibilities to influence the process:
For the next part of the lecture, Gabrielė hands out ideas like for example writing with a specific topic in mind. It’s kind of a brainstorming with formulizing sentences; sometimes they also turn into pictures or new ways of your own handwriting, the students realized.
The next phase is about focusing. When starting with the method, all thoughts were opened up and written down, now it’s about selecting your most important phrases, words or whole abstracts of your writing:
Narrowing it down means to choose one final topic. It’s maybe the hardest part and maybe you find new words that describe your unconscious thoughts even betters.
After we focused on this one perticular phrase or word, we start to dig into our unconsciousness again. The idea is to ask questions regarding this topic to find new interesting spots regarding this same issue:
Automatic Writing is a really intimate form of contextualizing your deepest thoughts and writing them down. Naturally, this process feels different for each- and everyone! In the penultimate session, the students talk about how they felt what they experienced during the process:
To the end of the workshop, Gabrielė gives ideas on how to challenge yourself in Automatic Writing. How is it with a specific music in background? How does some smell influence your writing? What about waking up at 5am and simply start to write? Enjoy the final part of the workshop and get into this creative writing method by yourself!