Beware the unconscious, they say. It’s a forest of triggers, trip-wired by traumas. Complexes grow tentacles in the dark. You’re not yourself when the unconscious takes hold, they say. Bring it into consciousness! Control it if you can! Conscious thought is the only thought that’s truly you.

They’re wrong.

The non-conscious part of your mind is, actually, where the true you resides. It’s just not THAT unconscious, the scary Freudian unconscious.

Trying to describe the feeling of awe without assuming some kind of external spiritual force, I come up with this: a respite from ego.

That respite from ego holds a paradox: I “disappear,” but I also feel intensely present, intensely myself. There’s a stimulus of some kind, either an activity I’m involved in or an experience that seems to make time stop—but it’s never the result of willed conscious thinking. So, it’s an expression of imaginative intelligence, which cannot be willed, only invited and allowed. Also, the stimulus that makes me respond that way doesn’t necessarily make you respond that way. So, it’s an intensely individual experience.

Bodily pleasure is a sensation; but what are the pleasures of the mind? Not exactly an emotional experience, though they generate happiness, satisfaction, contentment. Perhaps they belong in the realm of imaginative intelligence, which has, I believe, a function of informing you, confirming to you, when you’re right with yourself. They are all moments in which time falls away: moments complete in themselves, with no need to be anywhere else, to do anything else, to consider anything else.

And so, we weave an ego to protect the self, out of the tough fibers of those expectations, the knowledge of how our social world works, and our desires. We build an ego according to how we want to be seen by others, and how we want to see ourselves. This ego is responsible for navigating our way through the world: making plans and decisions and judgments, remembering the past and forming hopes for the future.

The ego is necessary for a functional life—but because it’s associated with the rational mind, the consciously thinking mind, it can smother or stain the self it was built to protect. And if it isn’t a good fit for the self inside it, it rubs and irritates. And frays.

So no matter how much someone seems to be "all brain," super-rational, divorced from body and emotion, "not a creative bone in my body," their imaginative intelligence is there, as potentially powerful as anyone else's, waiting to be explored. In over 20 years of teaching writing workshops, I’ve seen that everyone—yes, everyone—is capable of writing with originality, verve, and emotional impact. And that’s just writing. There are infinite ways of expressing your imaginative intelligence. Not just in the arts, but in science, technology, sports, business. By definition, anything new is born of imaginative intelligence.

You can diagram a factory, however complex. You cannot diagram zillions of exponential possibilities. So, we can't see how this works. There are no clear lines of cause and effect. It's frustrating, even enraging, because pretty soon most of us feel our rational minds coming up against the edge of their capacity. We tend to fear or hate things we don't understand. We say, this is just not natural!

But actually, isn't this a better model of our physical and mental intelligences? Despite all the mechanical models, our bodies remain inscrutable. Why do you get sick and I don't? Why do I have a screwy sacroiliac joint and you don't? Why is one of us a pessimist and the other an optimist, one of us an extrovert and the other an introvert? Human nature is not mechanical: people respond very differently to the same experience.

So, intelligence is the capacity to hold information and draw from it selectively, outputting it in new arrangements, which with our ordinary rational intelligence might be decisions or deductions or new thoughts and theories based on the information we've taken in throughout our lives, run through the codes of our beliefs and experiences.

Imaginative intelligence does the same thing, but the imagination is an exponentially more powerful processor than the rational mind. We don't remember far more than we remember. We aren't aware of zillions of bodily sensations that affect bodily processes, and bodily processes that affect our rational minds through mood and feelings of physical wellness or pain. Yet all this is stored in our body's memory,

This villanelle, written in anger at ridiculous literary “analysis,” is also a poetry quiz, containing 19 allusions to classic poems. How many can you spot

You know the feeling: somebody smiles, and you can’t help smiling. You see a face contorted in pain, and a grimace contorts your face too.

Not only is your face mirroring that other face; there’s a shift in your internal weather. With the smile comes a little jolt of happiness, like a shaft of sun breaking through clouds. Nothing in particular may have happened to make you happy, even though it’s always good to see more happiness in the world, so the happiness you’re feeling is not actually your own; it’s an echo of that other person’s happiness.

When you write by hand, you can't read what you wrote so easily (especially if your writing got faster and messier). You can't edit so cleanly and surgically. Crossing out is much uglier than deleting. Inserting requires squeezing words between the lines, and if they won't fit you have to turn the paper sideways to write up the margin. Nothing tempting here! Much easier to just say "what the hell" and keep writing.

Result, you up your chances of staying in the flow.

I am fascinated by the Imaginative Storm Writer Training! As a participant for a couple of years now, my creative mind has more of a say in my writing and more agency in my art and my life. So much so that I’ve spoken of it often to my friends and community, and was recently invited to teach a workshop on using the Imaginative Storm method.

My goal was to simply share this process with some friends, but it ended up being an even more transformative experience than I had imagined.

What difference did it make to the overwhelming problems of the day, coming at us from all corners, that we write? Besides the considerable personal rewards we reap, what does society gain because we choose to write, draw, sculpt, or create something from our imaginations? If we want to effect social change, wouldn’t it be better to run for office or protest in the streets or try out for the Supreme Court? What does art matter?

When you read your work aloud, you learn to focus on what you like more than on what you don't like. … And when you read a phrase or sentence or passage that you do like, you get a little rush of dopamine, the pleasure hormone. … This is how you effortlessly retrain your inner critic to support you rather than hinder you

Thanks to Sari Botton for inviting me to do this questionnaire. Check out her Substack Memoir Land. It’s terrific.

Allegra Huston is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and co-author of Write What You Don't Know, the book of the Imaginative Storm method which she developed in partnership with James Navé. She has written three other books, along with numerous screenplays and journalism for publications in the US and the UK. Her short film Good Luck, Mr. Gorski, has become a cult favorite. She teaches an annual 5-day memoir workshop in Nova Scotia and writes a regular Substack newsletter, Imaginative Storm.

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I'm 60. I wrote a few travel articles in my 20s to help pay for my holidays—sparked by a visit to Graceland and the hilarity of the tour guide's spiel. I started writing screenplays in my 30s, and then some magazine articles. I wrote my memoir Love Child in my 40s, my novel A Stolen Summer in my early 50s.

The Imaginative Storm project, which is my focus for the rest of my life, really got going in 2020; that's when my creative collaborator James Navé and I started work on Write What You Don't Know.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Write What You Don't Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow, 2022, though I imagine you want to focus on Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, 2009. I published the audiobook in 2019; I'm the voice reading it.

What number book is this for you?

Four and two halves:

Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, 2009

A Stolen Summer (Say My Name in hardback), 2018

How to Edit and Be Edited, 2018

How to Read for an Audience (with James Navé), 2018

Write What You Don’t Know, (with James Navé), 2022

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

Love Child is a straight-up memoir.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

When I was four, my mother was killed in a car crash. After she died, I was introduced to my father: an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke, the film director John Huston. Then, when I was 12, I was told that Dad wasn't actually my father and I met my biological father, the British historian and media personality John Julius Norwich. Love Child is the story of my odyssey to discover in which family I belonged, and finally to pull my own family together around me—with the realization that the chains of DNA and marriage certificates don't define a family: love does.

Love Child is the story of my odyssey to discover in which family I belonged, and finally to pull my own family together around me—with the realization that the chains of DNA and marriage certificates don't define a family: love does.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

As a child, I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer because it meant I could live anywhere. The problem was, I didn't like writing. I was very self-critical and felt that I wasn't creative, especially compared to the artistic folks who surrounded me. Getting a degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University lodged me firmly in the world of criticism and judgment—not creativity.

So, I went to work in an office and eventually became Editorial Director of the London publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson. But as you will guess, working in an office didn't suit me, and to be honest I wasn't a good publisher. I was a good editor, but I wasn't good at the schmoozing and office politics that being a good publisher requires.

I decided I would write screenplays—knowing the odds against getting anything made, but confident that I'd beat them. After thirty years and many screenplays written, I still haven't. But I remain hopeful!

I wrote a piece about how lucky I feel to have two fathers (published in Harper's Bazaar UK as "Daddies' Girl"). After that, three people urged me to write a memoir, and though to begin with I thought I'd said everything I had to say in 1500 words, the idea simmered. I had thought of writing something about "going in search of my mother"—who was widely loved, and whom I didn't know. So, the two ideas coalesced and I began work on what would become Love Child.

Louis Faber does it again! This is probably his fifth 10-minute poem, generated in our Saturday writing group, that he has had accepted for publication.

Use our daily prompts for fun, for “writer training,” and to explore your past from unexpected angles. Giving your imagination toys to play with is the way to add energy and authenticity and originality to any story: real or fictional, poetry or prose.

Not only does the Imaginative Storm method bring joy and energy to your writing practice, it expands your awareness and broadens your range of compassion and understanding. We've been amazed to see people's faces light up as they tell us how it has enriched their life.