What's going on down there?

“When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time—20 years in the case of Imperial Earth, and 10 years in the case of the novel I’m presently working on. So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas. It’s amazing how the subconscious self works on these things. I don’t worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.”
—Arthur C. Clarke

Lately I've been writing even when I'm not writing. I'll be in the car, the shower, a restaurant, the grocery store, and I'll be completely lost inside my own head, not just thinking about writing, actually writing. The descriptions, the dialogue, the action...all of it. In my head. I'm convinced that I sometimes move my lips along with my thought process. I've often caught total strangers. giving me questionable looks.

The other afternoon I worked tirelessly on revising my novel. When I stopped, I went downstairs to feed my cats. As I stood at the counter, the two of them circling my feet like sharks, suddenly I thought of the perfect thing for character X to say. I slopped the food in their bowls and raced back upstairs. Wrote one extra line of dialogue. Then wound up spending another half-hour at the computer.

I'm even doing it in my sleep. Really. I'll wake from a image-less dream where I hear the flow of a narrator's voice echoing in my mind. It won't necessarily be coherent material. I'm not even sure if its my book. But it's writing. It's definitely writing. Very strange.

New scenes develop out of nowhere. Friday night I saw a news brief about a 90 year man who still owns, runs, and operates his own barbershop. Suddenly I had an idea for a scene in the book. Not a scene, really. A 'clip.' There's a difference. A scene runs at least 700 words (or more), a clip can be under 300. This barbershop notion turned out to be an important clip though. It established an early hint of something that was to come. It worked beautifully.

I think I've been enmeshed with the story long enough now to where this kind of stuff happens on its own. In the beginning, yes, I had to actively seek out inspiration. But the wheels have been turning for nearly a year and a half, and it's true. The subconscious is an amazing tool. I'm beginning to think that so much of writing is to learning to activate this way too often dormant oasis that lies in all of us.