M. Laszlo's Blog

Anastasia’s Midnight Song follows from an idea book that I kept during my senior year of high school, fall of 1986-spring 1987. And it’s no surprise why Anastasia’s Midnight Song would end up trafficking in the juxtaposition of adolescence and the presence of evil: all of my time that senior year was divided between high school and countless journeys into the dodgy city—San Francisco.
In retrospect, there was nothing all that unusual about a depressed teenager in Contra Costa County taking the BART into the big city. Usually, though, the stereotypical depressed teenager would be going into either San Francisco or Berkeley so as to rendezvous with various questionable contacts. And, of course, many a depressed teenager takes his final trip into the city so as to hurl himself or herself off Golden Gate Bridge. That happens often enough.
By contrast, my tale seems so much more innocuous: my teenage depression had grown so severe that my parents had begun making me travel into the city each afternoon to see a therapist. The whole experience did tend to be rather mundane. While looking for a taxicab to take me to the therapist’s office, plenty of prostitutes and demented homeless people might walk by—but then the taxicab would take me straight to the therapist’s door, and that was that.
Despite all of the aforementioned, the glimpse into the city life gave me more than enough curiosity regarding the presence of evil, madness, crime, and psychopathy. And the contrast between the relative placidity of Contra Costa County and the perils of city life filled that journal and idea book with a longing to find the perfect setting in which to write a coming-of-age tale like no other that had ever been written—a tale something like A Separate Peace meets Tess of the d’Urbervilles meets Red Dragon. (Bear in mind Silence of the Lambs had not been published yet.)
So, what is Anastasia’s Midnight Song about? The answer depends upon which one of the two principal characters you were to ask. And given the fact that my teenage journals and idea books juxtaposed Contra Costa County with the rough-and-tumble city, it was always a foregone conclusion that the book that followed from those journals would be divided between two point-of-view characters.
According to the young lady, Anastasia, it’s a story about how a woman must confront and overcome misogyny and/or sexual harassment.
According to the depressed and temporarily demented young man, Jack, it’s a love story in which he must surely be perfect for her. Like a demented Don Quixote, Jack might even say it’s a story about committing to the goal of destroying evil—and a story about committing to the goal of winning the hand of a beautiful young lady. Suffice it to say, Jack would not necessarily understand that he himself presented the actual peril all along.
In a sense, Anastasia’s Midnight Song is a beauty-and-the-beast story. Nevertheless, neither beauty nor beast can adequately agree on the details. Still, isn’t that the way a coming-of-age story ought to be? Adolescence is a time for breaking away, a time of division. And shouldn’t a coming-of-age tale seek to capture that instability?
(Note to future readers: you ought to know that the concept of hypnotherapy will fall into a state of obsolescence one day. In time, science and medicine will find a cure for depression, dementia, psychopathy, and most forms of stress—and the cure will come by combining gene therapy with some or other therapy involving the stabilizing of one’s biochemistry itself.)
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. Anastasia’s Midnight Song is his second release with AIA Publishing.

Like anything else that anyone ever wrote, Anastasia’s Midnight Song solves an inner wound—specifically, a lingering sense of guilt that has afflicted me ever since high school.
To make a long story short, before transferring there, a murder had happened at my California alma mater. The commission of the crime had transpired a few years before attending said high school for my senior year.
Oddly, when the murder had first happened, the thought never once occurred that someday the grace of circumstance might take me to that very school. At the time of the murder, I knew nothing about it. Only after the fact did I happen to read an article about it in Rolling Stone.
And a year later, there I was—living in that very community and preparing for orientation day at that very high school. And as the days and weeks and months of my senior year passed by, gradually my sense of curiosity competed with my guilt—until the compulsion to bring up the subject of the murder proved too much. One afternoon after Spanish class, the question just slipped out. I asked an especially wise and sensitive classmate whether anyone at the school stayed in contact with the girl who had been convicted of the other girl’s murder. Without considering the wounds that a question like that would open, the dumb question just came out.
A silence followed the question, of course. No one wanted to talk about it. The wise, sensitive classmate did answer, though. Eventually. She alluded to a girl who still regularly visited the girl convicted of the murder. Then the conversation died out. Thankfully, I proved to be mature enough to not press things.
Later that year, while on a road trip to Santa Barbara, the compulsion to ask about the crime came over me a second time. At which point yet another classmate spoke of the murders. He was a snob, and he had a mean streak—and he had no compunction about sharing several disturbing rumors and gratuitous details. He liked talking about it. But that’s the funny thing about high school. Say what you will about a confused, desperate girl who murders her friend in a fit of temper, but high school is also filled with wildly hateful, even misanthropic people.
At that high school, we had skinheads who wore S.S. rings. And we had a classmate who idolized Adolf Hitler. There was also a chap who built bombs in his garage and passed out neo-Nazi flyers. (He went on to U.C. Berkeley and presently heads up a successful energy-management firm.)
All of which leads me to think that the reason why I’ve always felt guilty about not minding my own business is that deep down I’ve always known that the girl who went away for the murder was no worse than anyone else—and we were no better than her. Adolescence is a maddening time—a time when almost everyone tends to be temporarily insane. It is an aspect of the human condition. That’s why there is no reason to judge too pridefully. We are all imperfect.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. Anastasia’s Midnight Song is his second release with AIA Publishing.

Anastasia’s Midnight Song addresses the most complicated factors regarding a person’s coming of age—factors that sometimes blend together in the youthful search for love and the concurrent tragedy of teenage depression and mental illness.
What makes the book unique is that this tale is told from two points of view—that of a lovesick young man and that of the frightened young lady who happens to be the object of his desire. As such, the young man regards himself as nothing more than a lonely soul—while the young lady regards the young man as potentially the worst kind of psychopath. Put another way, Anastasia’s Midnight Song provides a coming-of-age tale that shows how even the most innocent of young people must learn to confront the presence of evil in this world.
There was never any mystery as to why this tale had to be written. In so many respects, the tale follows from that most haunting of coming-of-age tales: Romeo and Juliet.
Why does that tragic tale beguile us? One reason might be due to the fact that Juliet’s House of Capulet and Romeo’s House of Montague serve as metaphors for the cliques that are so crucial to young people—especially in their school days.
The violence provides another reason why Shakespeare’s tale resonates. This, too, speaks to all of us. As children, we fear the dark and the bump in the night and the notion that a monster might be lurking either beneath the bed or in the closet. However, most of us are safe and secure as children.
On the other hand, youth is a time for breaking away—and perhaps that is what holds the potential to put some of us in harm’s way. In short, Shakespeare’s tale resonates with us because he understands that youth is a time when we often come face to face with the presence of evil.
(With regard to all of Shakespeare’s swordplay, a memory suddenly shines forth. I’m back in school, and as the discussion of Shakespeare comes to dominate English class, the instinct to say something and to ensure a few class-participation points compels me to dubiously praise Shakespeare for not including too much violence. At which point an angry, bearded, liberal, alpha-male chap hollers at me from the other side of the room. And as he proceeds to relate a litany of violent sequences in various Shakespearean works, the chap glares at me with murder in his eyes. Ah, the wonder and the joy of academia.)
At any rate, even though the idea of violent conflict appears all throughout Romeo and Juliet, the topic pales in comparison to the idea of suicide. And Romeo’s suicide always seemed so peaceful and so simple. Then again, when Juliet bowls off, she does so in the most remarkably violent way—the dagger as terrible as any weapon that any thug has ever wielded. Nevertheless, Romeo and Juliet leaves me intellectually dis-satisfied. Ever since my own dour teenage years, the thought has always occurred and recurred: there must be a more Socratic way to combine and to manifest the variables that comprise the tale. And ultimately, it is that intellectual dis-satisfaction that inspired Anastasia’s Midnight Song.
With apologies to William Shakespeare, of course.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. Anastasia’s Midnight Song is his second release with AIA Publishing.

The madman pointed at her winding watch and then tapped the dial. “Do you remember the night of the big fire in Leicester Square? I’ll never forget the moment when that blitz buggy crashed into the side of the Odeon and the whole building burst into flames. Aye, not a wee bit like Cocoanut Grove last year.”
For a time, she watched the movie—a shot of a panicked crowd huddled in a London air-raid shelter. How to help the madman? Maybe some duty nurse working at one of Manhattan’s teeming emergency rooms might be willing to administer a placebo.
At last, Jean turned to the vagabond and attempted to smile. “Please, let me take you to a hospital.”
“For what reason? Do you work in the parapsychology department?”
“Enough. You’re ill. So, let’s go. Before the intermission reel comes on.”
“No, I’ll never go to no sawmill. I’d much prefer to perish with the children. Like the ones out there at Pudding Mill.”
“Forget all that. Let’s get out of here and remedy your dementia. Then, in keeping with meaningful coincidences and synchronicity and all, perhaps you’ll provide a clue as to what’s happened to Fingal.”
“Fingal? So, did the germs get him? That’s the life here in the city, everyone coughing and sneezing and spreading blight and disease and deadly microbes.”
“Please, sir. You’ve nothing to fear. It’s just that you’re plagued by delusions.”
“You think so? Something’s gone wrong with me, eh? Like a cloud of neon gas must’ve streamed into my ears and tainted my brain matter?” Now the madman placed the tip of his index finger against his temple and rotated his wrist clockwise and counterclockwise three times—as if to suggest a masonry bit drilling into his skull. “Ha.”
She turned back to the film: a close-up of Merle Oberon. What do I do?
The vagrant nudged her shoulder. “If you please. I’m not bloody mental. The trouble’s quite simple. I’ve got me a nemesis, and he’s outside. Did you notice the chap lurking about somewhere? I think he might be hiding behind that big green livestock trailer.”
Jean trembled uncontrollably, for the psychotic’s hysteria served to remind her of the pathology with which Fingal’s projection had always sought to vex its prey.
The deranged old man grabbed hold of her wrist. “Do you recall the time the spitfire shot apart that Nazi dive-bomber, and the burly Luftwaffe pilot bailed out and engaged his ripcord and landed in my garden? I’d be the one who apprehended him. Yes, and I myself confiscated his prized Luger PO8. And a pocketful of Reichsmarks, as well, if memory serves.”
Jean attempted to pull away. She had to escape the old man, for this whole interlude had proven to be nothing more than a diversion. Synchronicity, indeed. Now she scratched the old man’s face.
At last, she pulled away—and then she returned to her feet.
When she continued into the aisle, the lunatic lunged toward her. “Why do you cock a snook at me? Do you think Windsor Field put that pilot in shackles? No, I did it.”
“Oh hush.” Again, she scratched the old man’s face.
“Ask the War Office, and they’ll tell you the story.”
“Oh, be quiet. I’m leaving, I say. Goodbye, sir.”
“But the pilot, I’m sure he’s waiting outside.” At that point, the elderly gentleman fell to his knees and grabbed hold of her ankle. “Suppose the pilot recognizes you. He’ll follow you home and nick all your war bonds.”
“Let go,” she cried out. Then she made a fist, and she struck the old man’s shoulder several times over.
“He’s right glib,” the old man continued. “My rival, he’s a master of disguise, that one, always playing the part of some character. Like an actor in a picture show, he dissembles, and that’s just how he’ll seek to entice you with some grand ruse. Then he’ll take you to his bed-sitter and offer you cherries jubilee and a lovely tea, and then he’ll slit your throat.”
She grabbed the old man’s lapels and shook him as vigorously as she could.
Tears in his eyes, the lunatic gasped and wheezed and spat—the old man plainly struggling for air.
Thankfully, the usher finally happened along. “Hey, break it up already,” the young man shouted. “This theatre caters strictly to high society. You mooks know what I’m saying?”
She let go, and clenching her fists, struck her adversary’s brow several times—until he released her ankle.
The usher grappled with him at that point. Then, as they fell to the floor, the old man let out an animalistic shriek—as if he must be undergoing a psychotic episode and perhaps believed himself to be standing in the heart of some phantasmagoric world.
She smoothed out her gown, fixed her hair, and made her escape.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. On the Threshold is his second release and first with Tahlia Newland’s Awesome Independent Authors.

Some who read my latest work, On the Threshold, may possibly wonder just what in the world would be the origins of the burning-man figure so central to the story. Without a doubt, the figure very much follows from the famous Burning Man Festival. And honestly, there was no avoiding it. From the fall of 1986 to the spring of 1987, I finished my senior of high school at Miramonte in Orinda, out in Contra Costa County. And back then, we knew about the bonfire rituals taking place on some beach somewhere in the Bay Area—even if none of us were quite old enough to attend. Naturally, our youthful ignorance only made the idea of attending the ritual that much more compelling.
In addition, what could be more fascinating than the idea of torching a burning-man figure? At once, the concept gripped me. At very nearly the same time, in Mr. Schulman’s Government and International Relations class, we discussed the monks who had immolated themselves so as to protest the war in Vietnam. That, too, rattled me—because until that class discussion, I had never heard of such a thing. Even then, though, the basic idea of a burning man resonated—and in the deepest way, too. Clearly, my unconscious mind knew that there must be something of greatest meaning in the idea. And even if it took a lifetime to figure it all out, that was something worth doing. To grasp the meaning of the symbol would be on par with any of the most heartfelt epiphanies a human being might have. I just knew this!
Ultimately, On the Threshold lays the secret bare. My book explains just why the burning man resonates and must resonate so deeply in the human psyche. In my book, too, the people who come to grasp the meaning immediately establish a friendly, inclusive intellectual/spiritual movement by which to share their thoughts and ideas with one another. Obviously, the Ten Principles of Burning Man clearly influenced all of that.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do hope that some Burning-Man attendees will buy my book. In addition, though, it is my hope that people won’t have to buy the book. What an honor it would be if my work were to make people think enough that, in the end, they lend the book to a friend. What an honor it would be if it came to be fairly common to pass the book around.
Whatever happens, I’ll never cease to be thankful for Burning Man. And it’s a good feeling to know that something so positive helped to inspire the making of a well-intentioned book. Let’s not forget that a well-intentioned book is a wonderful thing in this stressful, chaotic world.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. On the Threshold is his second release and first with Tahlia Newland’s Awesome Independent Authors.

So much of the inspiration for my work, On the Threshold, comes from the notorious Amityville murders of 1974. Chances are that many children growing up in the 1970’s found the murders to be disturbing and unforgettable.
When the tragic Defeo family moved into their famous house, it is my understanding that the father named their home “High Hopes” and set up a friendly sign stenciled with those very words. What many fail to grasp is that the song from which the name derives is not so much a song of hope as it is a song of futility. Specifically, the song tells of a determined ant trying to move a rubber-tree plant—something plainly impossible. My profoundly-personal feeling is that the father unconsciously knew that it was futile for him to think that he could remedy his son’s antisocial tendencies by moving the family to a beautiful house in Amityville. This might also help to explain why the father chose to paint the house a somber black. One other note: the father had the “High Hopes” sign written in a Gothic, Germanic-looking script. Could it be that he had already noticed the fact that his antisocial son loved loud, violent WWII movies? More to the point, the father must have at least unconsciously noticed that when his son watched those loud, violent movies, he did not identify with John Wayne and the Americans. Rather, the son rooted for the Nazis.
At any rate, so much of my work deals with the workings of the unconscious mind and the wisdom and knowledge stored there. That thematic topic runs throughout the text and is augmented by the fact that one of the protagonists just happens to be a film critic who employs phenomenological film theory as a means of understanding the workings of the unconscious mind. The novel had to include such a character, though—and looking back at the Amityville murders, it is no mystery why.
Before Butch Defeo committed the murders, he watched a movie on the late show: Castle Keep, a WW-II picture starring Burt Lancaster. Could it be that the movie appealed to something in the murderer’s drug-addled unconscious mind? The movie tells of Hitler’s army storming a Belgian castle. Plainly, the murderer identified with those German soldiers tasked with the violent conquest. And if that’s true, the murderer’s unconscious mind could very well have equated his father with those holding authority over the castle—both the Belgian count and his friend, the American officer portrayed by Burt Lancaster. In short, as the murderer watched the movie that fateful night, he came to equate the castle, the setting for the movie, with the family house there in Amityville.
Let’s remember, too, that as the murderer watched the movie, he watched it at full volume. He did this because he enjoyed the violent sounds of war. This is important because the cacophony must have weighed upon the family’s collective unconsciousness as they slept and heard the terrible clamor. By the time, the murderer burst into their rooms and demanded that they roll over onto their bellies, the family was already in a state of something like shellshock. As for why the murderer would demand that the family members roll onto their bellies, this, too, is no mystery at all: the murderer made such demands only because he could not bear to look upon their faces and to risk eye contact in that moment he pulled the trigger.
One other point that is important to understand: following the commission of the horrible crime, the murderer took it upon himself to trim his beard in a distinctive way—and in a way that he had never worn it either before or since. The question is why. Here’s the answer: in trimming his beard in the way that he did, he made it look something like the way the Belgian count wore his beard in the movie. In a sense, when the murderer trimmed his beard, he was telling himself that he had conquered the castle and that he was in charge now and that he would be the count from this moment forward. Again, though, the point is that the murderer unconsciously saw his own experience in the movie. His conscious mind saw a WW-II picture that fateful night, but his unconscious mind detected the archetypes that spoke to his own condition.
These aforementioned themes abound all throughout my work. Without a doubt, the WW-II film, Castle Keep, predetermined the decision to set my tale in a castle. (In the interest of full disclosure, I named my castle after the building where the English Department meets at my alma mater, Hiram College.)
Most important of all, the idea of phenomenological film theory has always informed my thoughts on the unconscious mind. Ultimately, film theory ignited my obsession with Plato and his idea of inborn knowledge. Deep down inside, I’ve always know that the resolution to the riddle of the universe exists within us and has always been there.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. On the Threshold is his second release and first with Tahlia Newland’s Awesome Independent Authors.

On the Threshold follows from an idea book written while working on an M.F.A degree in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York; c. 1990.
At the time, there were two kinds of poetry students at Sarah Lawrence. The first type wrote in an obscurantist, free-association style. The second type preferred confessional poetry. Alas, neither style of writing really applied to my interests. The thing that did it for me was the philosophical poem—the type of poem that the other students tended to regard as “boring.” No matter what the others thought, though, nothing could shake my faith. What could be more fascinating than a poem that seeks to explain the riddle of the universe?
Looking back on that era, the thought occurs that this was about the time that my preferences changed from poetry to prose. That would explain why it became necessary to translate all those philosophical poems into one long novelistic work that could bring everything together. Oddly, it was not visionary, metaphysical fiction that sold me on prose. At the time, believe it or not, no kind of prose writing fascinated me quite as much as film theory—particularly phenomenological film theory.
In the early nineties, my sister attended NYU film school—and she would often tell me about cutting-edge writing that followed from the theories of Walter Benjamin and Carl Jung. Much of these theories show up in On the Threshold—especially the notion that when we watch a movie, only the conscious mind follows the plot. The unconscious mind reacts to the symbols and archetypes and interprets the movie as a reiteration of some primal association of ideas—as if the unconscious mind really does contain within it inborn knowledge, just as Plato had always believed.
As peculiar as all this might sound, the idea of phenomenological theory soon had me obsessing about The Mary Tyler Moore Show. To make a long story short, in one quirky prose poem after the next, I would meditate on the notion that The Mary Tyler Moore Show contains within it the phenomenology and archetypes that L. Frank Baum put into The Wizard of Oz:
Mary driving to the big city = Dorothy on her way to Emerald City.
Mary fighting over the apartment with Rhoda = Dorothy’s house landing on the Wicked Witch.
Mary’s getting caught between two adversaries, Phyllis Lindstrom and Rhoda, = Dorothy’s getting caught between Glinda and the Wicked Witch.
Also:
The Cowardly Lion = Lou Grant and his fear of women in the workplace.
The brainless Scarecrow = the brainless Ted Baxter.
The heartless Tin Man = the insolent Murray Slaughter.
And finally:
Dorothy’s clicking her heels and saying “There’s no place like home” = the final episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the one in which everyone gets fired and promptly sings a song of homecoming: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
Perhaps it is no mystery why On the Threshold had to contain a strong, intellectual woman character—and perhaps it is no surprise why that character would be so helpful in bringing about the resolution. All the source material for the book comes from a time when the author just happened to be studying with loads of women at Sarah Lawrence. Moreover, how to deny my sister’s influence? The funny thing, though, is that many a feminist reader might oppose the work on the grounds that the women characters are not independent enough nor do they speak to one another enough with regard to women’s history and women’s issues. Whatever the case may be, the point of my work is not to offend. The point is to resolve the riddle of the universe, and it is my firm conviction that my characters do just that—and they do it for everyone, irrespective of either race or creed or gender.
M. Laszlo lives in Bath Township, Ohio. He is an aging recluse, rarely seen nor heard. On the Threshold is his second release and first with Tahlia Newland’s Awesome Independent Authors.

When we look out at the world, we seek to understand the phenomena—and as we seek to do that, we quickly realize that nothing can help us other than our memories. Here’s the thing, though: the remembrance of persons, places, and things past enlightens only because we readily recollect important concepts. That’s why we love to read books written in the past tense. We can assume that something important must have happened in order to have inspired the pages in our hands.
We might as well lose ourselves in the past. Why? Because the ethical issues that face modern society never really change all that much. The struggles are eternal.
When I traveled to London back in the summer of 1985, every impulse told me to keep a diary replete with my thoughts and observations. Still, even then, the things that haunted me were the things that happened in the recent past.
Thinking back to that summer of 1985 in London, one event more than any other really triggered me and pretty much ensured my resolve to someday address the human condition. At one point, a bunch of us traveled north to Liverpool, where we stayed in the dorms—which doubled as youth hostels back in the day. At any rate, in the morning, the Beatles’ Museum came to collect us in the Magical-Mystery-Tour bus, at which point the curator proceeded to give us a guided tour of all the places in the city pertaining to the Beatles’ lives and/or the lyrics to the songs. After a while, we came to the gates of Strawberry Fields Orphanage. It was then that the curator/guide told me an absolutely heartrending true-life tale: evidently, one summer before, a young man had traveled from South America to take the Magical Mystery Tour—and when he had reached the gates of the orphanage, he had backed up into the street in order to get the perfect shot of the iconic gate. Sure enough, a motorcar had come along and had killed him. At that point, the curator told me all about how the young man’s parents had then traveled from South America, only because they had wanted to see the place where their beloved son had died. And according to the curator, when she had brought them to Strawberry Fields Orphanage, the young man’s parents had wept so hard that they had both ended up clinging to the gate lest they fall to their knees.
As a youth of seventeen years, the story was as devastating as anything anyone had ever told me. The story haunts me to this day, and it influenced the ending of one of my novellas, (Mouvements Perpètuels to be precise.) There was no avoiding it, though. The simple but haunting true story was the first time that someone had ever really confronted me with the necessity of addressing the preciousness and fragility of life. Also, it should come as no surprise that the Strawberry Fields tale ultimately came to serve as the anchor and lynch pin for a novella that compares and contrasts the abortion issue and the euthanasia issue alike. In a way, the young man who died at the gates of that orphanage became my muse. That’s my feeling anyway.
To be sure, all authors have similar kinds of wounds that they endeavor to heal through the art of writing. Perhaps this is why the sensitivity factor is so important. One must be prepared to examine issues surrounding power and privilege and saviorism and such. In a sense, though, book lovers have always been this way. Back in the eighteenth-century literary salons of Berlin, Rahel Varnhagen discussed anything and everything with Goethe, Brentano, and whoever else might be reading selections on any given night. Let’s not forget, though, that more often than not, those authors discussed and debated stories from the past—the stories and true-life events that had served to inspire their poetry. The same applies to authors. Whenever we do zoom calls and that kind of thing, the feeling is one of belonging to a really conscientious literary salon. Again, though, the tales that people share always center around wounds experienced in the past.
One last thing. When we engage in the remembrance of persons, places, and things past, we unconsciously acknowledge that other cerebral function—the impulse to think presciently and to prepare for the unknown. As ironic as it might seem, nothing really helps us to prepare for the future quite like a heartfelt reckoning with the past event.

For many writers, artists, and musicians, every instinct tells them to jot words and ideas down onto paper lest they be forgotten. Again, the process is utterly instinctive. However, when said thinker is ready to turn the material into a book or movie or whatever else, that process can be utterly confounding. Just how is it done?
The way to do it is to separate ideas into categories—something like the way my mother does jigsaw puzzles. She separates the corner pieces from the rest, and then she separates categories by color—on the off chance that like colors must go together.
Thankfully, my mother’s jigsaw puzzle obsession taught me how to make sense of my youthful journals and idea books.
A few years ago, when I revisited my youthful London diary written in the summer of 1985, every instinct told me what to do. At first, the process was entirely scientific: to make sense of all that teenage angst and rambling, indulgent content, I had to take up a pair of scissors and to literally cut lines into pieces—fragments not unlike those of a jigsaw puzzle. There was no better way to isolate the variables.
Having done all that, only the act of brainstorming could help to fill in all the blank spaces and to turn the disparate material into actual novellas. Of course, that aspect of the process was anything but scientific. Still, the brainstorming process proved to be fairly simple. By accepting the various piles of notes and their content, it suddenly became quite clear just what kinds of subjects and themes my unconscious mind or muse would have me write about and/or dramatize.
Take Live Aid, for example. From my 1980s teenage perspective, the big London event that summer would have been the benefit concert at Wembley. At the time, everyone was talking about and/or debating the efficacy of famine relief. Even now, the topic remains quite important. Part of the problem back then followed from the fact that the dysfunction in Africa had always been a tragic function of the Cold War. At any rate, all those lugubrious conversations gave me at least a youthful understanding of just how omnipresent warfare is, was, and always will be. Thankfully, the eventual choice to put my novellas into the WW-I era gave me the opportunity to depict young people trying to come to terms with the same kinds of cataclysmic events that crept up in conversation during the summer of 1985.
Another big event/issue that emerged from isolating the variables was the AIDS crisis. Young people talked about it because many of our favorite bands talked about it. Anyway, the AIDs crisis inspired a novella in which the point-of-view character must confront the idea of sexually-transmitted diseases and the idea that at least some may prove to be lethal.
Another one of the novellas that grew out of my youthful diary hinges upon the question of obscenity and public morals. In that tale, a woman comes to see an art-gallery exhibition as the stuff of misogyny, objectification, and pornography. As such, the woman takes drastic action to rectify the problem. At any rate, the honest-to-goodness reason why that issue crept up in my journals had to do with the notorious “Page-Three Girl” phenomenon. Before spending a summer in London, I never knew that the Sun took it upon itself to publish topless pictures. The issue became unavoidable, though, because the working-class family that hosted me that summer read the Sun religiously.
Years later, it occurred to me that a similar crime as the one described in my novella did in fact happen back in that era: evidently, someone attacked a Rembrandt nude at about that time. How impressive it would be had that been the impetus for addressing the obscenity/pornography debate. Alas, the thing that got me thinking about it as a teenager was actually no more prosaic than the page-three images staring back at me from my host family’s kitchen table.
Finally, it might be a good idea to mention Hyde Park. All summer long, the Speakers’ Corner fascinated me—both because of the political activists and the performance artists. That said, when cutting up my journals and putting things back together in a new way, I quickly realized that nothing dominated the Speakers’ Corner in the summer of 1985 quite like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even the anti-Apartheid speakers obsessed about it. At any rate, given all that time spent in Hyde Park, there could be no avoiding the issue of the Israel/Palestine conflict in at least one of my novellas. One should also remember that London society was replete with anti-Israel passion back then. The kaffiyeh had been popular there for years, and the Human League had a big hit protest song about Lebanon. In addition, John Landis had a big hit movie back in the day, An American Werewolf in London—and it told of Americans with Jewish-sounding names (David Kessler and Jack Goodman) coming to London and turning into bloodthirsty werewolves. It always seemed like a meaningful coincidence to me that the film would be so popular at a time when London’s anti-Israel sentiments were becoming so ubiquitous.
(By the way, the idea of meaningful coincidences was a fairly popular topic of discussion back then due to the fact that the Police had an album out called Synchronicity. The title track of the album consisted of Sting more or less defining the whole Jungian concept. For what it’s worth, I think it’s great that Sting of all people was the one who really introduced Generation X to the great Carl Jung.)
Finally, it should be noted that many writers do produce perfectly lucid journals, diaries, and idea books—works that should NEVER be cut up. Still, not everybody writes cleanly. For angst-ridden teenagers, idea books and journals can be magnificently chaotic. The big challenge for me as a person turning a lifetime of idea books into fiction works is that every single diary that I have ever kept, even the ones written as an adult, are just as convoluted as the youthful one that I kept all those years ago, during that glorious summer in London.

Many ideas come from our conscious observations of the phenomenological world, obviously. Still, we must remember that in the selfsame moment that we consciously observe said phenomena, the unconscious mind also reflects on the experience. As such, we cannot speak about where ideas come from unless we seek to grasp the stream of the unconscious.
In a sense, the Greek myth of the Muses holding court on Mount Helicon serves as a metaphor for the unconscious mind and all the ideas that come from that aspect of the psyche. In addition, the Greek myth of the Muses very much jibes with ancient Greek culture’s fascination with dreams. The concept of the unconscious mind goes hand in hand with the concept of dreams because a dream itself is little more than a glimpse into the stream of one’s unconscious thoughts. What is miraculous is that when we awaken, we sometimes remember that glimpse into that otherwise unknown milieu.
A writer should always seek to learn from his or her dreams. This follows from the fact that our unconscious mind thinks for itself and stores its own knowledge and makes its own decisions. If a writer considers his or her dreams and unconscious impulses, the writer will be a better person—and the writer will present ideas that have the potential to be that much more worthwhile to the reader.
The reader, too, must consider his or her dreams and unconscious mind—even if said reader never writes anything. Think about a man like Johnny Appleseed. Conventional wisdom tells us that he traveled the land planting apple trees as a process of sublimation. Unlucky in love, his conscious thoughts and unconscious impulses convinced him to wander about planting the beautiful, sensual trees. That’s what writers do, albeit in their own way. In short, if your mind is healthy, your unconscious mind only wishes to serve your needs and help you to be all that you can be. So, your unconscious mind sends you helpful ideas.