“The Thought Fox”

I wanted to promote this comment from handsomehead about my son Luke’s advice on writing — “Go into the story and find the animals”:

Hey I just stumbled across your blog while I was googling ‘story structure’in an attempt to ‘Go Into The Story’ myself!!! And just thought I’d leave a little message to say that I thought your son’s advice to ‘go into the story and find the animals’ was an inspired comment. I’m doing a creative writing degree in the UK and have been finding it hard recently to respond to the writing tasks being set — I feel a bit like I’ve lost my mojo. Anyway I came across a Ted Hughes poem the other day called ‘The Thought Fox’ which is basically about going into a story to find the animals. He tried to advise Sylvia Plath of this process in a letter -

“The thing to do in thinking about anything is not to try and get a clear mental picture of it, or a distinct mental concept, with all its details there, vivid in your brain, but to try to look at the actual thing happening in front of you. I find a clear distinction between these two types of thinking about a thing. As soon as I begin imagining the thing happening in my world, everything comes right. That’s not quite it. It’s as though in the first way of thinking I thought about the thought, taking the thought and forcing it into shape or realness. In the second way it’s more like the process of memory, I think straight to the thing and am not conscious of any mental intervention. … The second way I get the feel, weight, sound, every nuance of atmosphere about a concrete thing”

Fantastic — and that second way is where we, as writers, want to get ourselves by going into the story. And as far as “finding the animals,” here’s the poem “The Thought Fox” from poet Ted Hughes:

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed

No matter how much we study and practice and dissect and think and all the rest, finally writing is a mystery. Each writing session requires an act of faith — to take the plunge and go into the story. The animals of our imagination are there… waiting.