![]() ![]() Every film she watches, I lurk in the corners, just off camera. The writer is obsessed with one thing only my imaginary life. Pixels, actually, even though she did know how to hold a pen. You’ve got to turn this draft in by the end of tomorrow.’ We can vacillate over this for the rest of my life.’ ‘How about I just keep my youthful good looks, now that you’ve found that Gypsy Girl thingie.’ ‘How about you’re a hundred and twelve at the end of the book and you’ve aged nine years for every two centuries?’ Your readers are already confused enough as it is.’ ‘And you don’t want to change physical form? Even though you shape shift through the ages?’ ‘Well then, you’ll just have to develop me.’ ‘How about the time I was raped in the Holy of Holies. ![]() ‘I’m getting to that when I write Chapter VIII.’ ![]() ‘I went to an orgy once at a village fair. ‘Like a merry-go-round at a village fair?’ Anyhow, I’d like to see how this stance of immortal life can gather its own momentum.’ That director hadn’t even read the treatment.’ ‘Fair enough, but not like that time you came out in that Momentum meeting and had me playing air guitar on the boardroom table.’ I can’t have you so autonomous that you run the show. Throw me headlong into mayhem and see how I cope.’ Otherwise there’s no empathy with the character.’ ‘You’re on and on about this human condition thing.’ But the problem is you can’t ever truly experience your humanity unless you grow.’ ‘Well, as an eternal archetype, you’re doomed to live forever. They won’t even let girls say it at cemeteries.’ People always seem to seek immortality, then we discover we’re only human and then it’s all over bar the kaddish. ‘As I said in my proposal, I want you to experience immortality differently, take the risk of existence and non-existence, over and over again.’ ‘Nu, what do you want from me? I’m your creation, after all.’ It was time for the writer to ask ‘What does Wanda want? What is her gift? Her destiny?’ A totem animal? A conch? An oud? An ancestor? explained, by which this method can invoke us to ask our inner creatures Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you need or want? It’s a telling exercise to speak to symbols. Jung a sustained, conscious dialogue with an archetype conjured from the deep. She had to look that one up.ĭuring her decades of psychotherapy, the writer had dabbled with a technique called Active Imagination, advocated by my good friend, C. ![]() I’ve tried to tell her to edit some of it out, but she says not yet. She’s bobbing about on that fictional ocean of hers, tugged to the depths by the occasional storm and catapulting to the surface once more with a pearl or two of her own irritating oyster trajectory. Perhaps that’s why this novel of hers is so fragmented, even with seven months to go. Now she sits on the horns of a veritable shofar revival holy matrimony versus lifelong independence? Historical veracity versus a little shoehorning? Plot over character? Point of view? The disembodied voice in her ear, the character crawling into shape, the eternally curious archetype of autonomy, whispering ‘come, come fetch me from the depths of your experience and imagination, and let me see the light’. She’s written thousands of scripts, travelled her own creative journey, knows all the tricks and turns of the hieros gamos, the marriage between the conscious and unconscious minds, where the real miracles take place. Measuring high on the autodidactic Richter scale and wondering if she would ever achieve her full writer’s flow. ![]()
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