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April 25: Automatic writing is generally defined as writing that results from a surrender to the unconscious. I think of it as self-generated writing. Each word in a text of automatic writing dictates the next, usually due to similarity of sound, or some denotational or connotational relationship, often very subjective. Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, for example. In truth, the brain is as much in control of it as it is of any other kind of writing, but the control is restricted to fewer awarenesses than are involved in mormal writing. The grammatical awareness, for instance, is given a holiday. Indeed, the absence of the grammatical awareness's participation may be the main definational feature of automatic writing.
There is also pre-verbalized writing, as most of mine is. All that is, is writing one does in one's head, with one's critical sense in operation, before writing it down--or, nowadays, typing it into one's computer. Needless to say, once one gets going, the writing writes itself, with little or no preverbalization. I think that most of what results is still pre-verbalized, only more and more later than the pre-verbalization. Or the pre-organization that goes on with most of what we do as writers, and as human beings. By this I mean the averbal cerebration that precedes most of our actions: the vague feeling that it might be a good thing to write about automatic writing that averbally got me into what I'm now writing, for instance. Lots else, of course.
I suppose I should mention "overseen writing," too--writing that is supervised by various awarenesses as one carries it out. This would be another difference between normal writing and automatic writing, the latter not being overseen--or overseen without effect. The overseeing, it should be obvious, is what causes us to adjuct what we're writing as we go along.
I guess I'd divide normal writing into "preverbalized writing," "overseen writing" and "effortless writing." The third of these seems like automatic writing, but isn't because one's brain is more involved with it than it is with automatic writing (which really isn't automatic). In the last analysis, normal writing is a combination of preverbalized, overseen and effortless. Automatic writing is agrammatical writing.
Just random thoughts occasioned by Geof Huth's observation that all writing is automatic writing (which he, for some reason, doesn't feel destroys the value of "automatic writing" as a descriptive term).
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