iUniverse author John C. Woodcock’s insights on writing: Part 8

iUniverse Blog continues the excellent series of posts from prolific author John C. Woodcock as he explores the raison d’être for the style and form of writing of his latest book UR-image.

“A key methodological approach in producing this kind of “mad” writing is that the author takes seriously whatever phenomenon presents itself, in its own terms. The author must be able to remain “within” the phenomenon long enough so that it can teach her what it means in terms of its own logic, no matter how crazy it may sound when appraised from the categories of our current form of consciousness. The author is thus compelled to think self-presentational thoughts that defy rationality. I’ll give one example here from Dick’s book, Valis, which I also read, subsequent to writing UR-image, with enormous enthusiasm..

Dick tells us of a dream he had in which he is living with this wife:

Pre WWII Car“I have had dreams of another place myself, a lake up north and the cottages and small rural houses north and the cottages and small rural houses around its south shore. In my dream I arrive there from Southern California, where I live; this is a vacation spot, but it is very old-fashioned. All the houses are wooden, made of the brown shingles so popular in California before World War Two. The roads are dusty. The cars are older, too.”

Following the dream, which Dick accepts completely in its own terms, he begins to compare its reality with his outer reality which does not include many of the elements in the dream. He then gets a memory of his father and realizes that in his dream he is living his father’s life. From this achievement, Dick argues further that the individual contains the history not only of her personal life but of our entire race, back to its origins, back to the stars: “This is gene pool memory, the memory of the DNA.”

Read here to know more about iUniverse author John C. Woodcock’s insights on writing