The Woo: In Celebration of the Inexplicable Magic of Creative Writing

If you believe your book knows what it wants to be, or that it's guiding you as much as you're guiding it, you're already dancing with the woo.

For me (and likely many of you, too!), the woo is a year-round phenomenon—not just the stuff of All Hallows’ Eve or Day of the Dead. I was raised religious (Presbyterian), but to spiritually minded parents who embraced the mystical. My dad believed the Bible stories really happened, and my mom discovered her affiliation with goddesses later in life, after she left the church.

Since I’ve been an adult, I’ve lived in the Bay Area (Berkeley) where a lot of people are woo-woo, and yet, I can’t tell you how often people relay some mystical, inexplicable experience only to follow it with an apology: “Sorry to get all woo-woo on you,” they’ll say, the tell of a closeted believer. Which is a funny thing for Californians because people who aren’t from here think everything we do—yoga, meditation, energy healing, massage, burning sage—is woo-woo. But all that shit’s just another day in Berkeley, spirituality aside.

Because it’s Halloween week, I want to elevate and celebrate the woo, and talk a bit about how deeply interconnected it is with writing fiction and memoir. In defining the woo, I’m talking about anything mystical, really—all the strange and wildly weird things we experience when we write—the coincidences, synchronicities, the ways the stars align. It also applies to connecting with people who’ve passed away, in our dreams, or through symbols in the real world (a common one being animal sightings when there’s some sort of significance or tie to the person who’s passed). The woo happens when novelists’ characters whisper in their ears, and continues because deep relationships get cultivated with these fully fledged people who don’t breathe or walk on this earth.

Writing this piece, I remembered listening to an interview with Joan Didion and Terry Gross in which Didion shared that she’d had a nervous breakdown in 1968, but really, she reflected in the interview, looking back, she wouldn’t characterize it as such. She wasn’t hospitalized, but she did see a psychiatrist who asked her questions, and she said that “a lot of my reactions to questions asked by a psychiatrist came out of that mood.” The doctor described her as being alienated from the rest of the world. Didion was writing a novel at the time and said about the experience, “Once you’re deeply into it, you resent it when you have to go out and talk to dinner, and you find them an intrusion to this imaginary world.”

The other day on a walk with a friend who lives here in Berkeley, she explained to me how the story of her novel came to her on a trip to South America. She walked into a room and her protagonist’s entire backstory came flooding into her mind. Later on that same trip, she contracted a fever, and continued to “fever dream” the novel that she’s still writing to this day. It won’t let her go, nor will she let it go.

I know I’m not alone in the belief that a book knows what it wants to be. For me to harbor this belief, it means I believe a given book-to-be has its own agency, that the book co-creates alongside its author, that the book brings its own power to the relationship. The more you leave yourself open to these possibilities and probabilities, the more meaningful your writing journey can be.

Here are just a few synchronicities I’ve experienced since starting my memoir:  

1. I wrote about my best friend who passed away from ALS and happened across a photo of her later that afternoon in a place where I don’t usually store photos.
2. After forgetting the name of a restaurant where my ex and I had an early date, three days later I drove by a different place by the same name in a different city.
3. I wrote a scene featuring my dad, who passed away in May—and for the rest of that week I spotted more than the usual number of Boston Terriers—the breed of dog my dad had my entire life.

Most of us have mixed feelings about the inexplicable. Like, maybe these things really can be explained. Maybe synchronicities are simply the act of paying deeper attention. Or maybe you’re a person who embraces the magic all the way, so the inexplicable is rewarding to you, winks from the universe you already know is holding you. I think it’s the openness to it all that matters. We become more porous when we write. We exist in liminal spaces by default—as memoirists, in the past and the present; as novelists, in all kinds of eras and inside all sorts of characters, in a space between the real and the imagined. The gift of paying attention to the synchronicities and embracing the woo is that it orients our attention to the things we choose to pay attention to—and what a gift that is, especially in this modern world where distractions constantly threaten to pull us under, or thwart our creative efforts. Epictetus, a famous Stoic from the AD times, said, “You become what you give your attention to.” Thus, when we’re open, we become writers who keep ourselves open to the miracles.

I couldn’t find an exact origin for where the term “woo-woo” comes from, other than maybe it was, according to English Language and Usage, “intended to imitate the eerie background music of sci-fi/horror films and television shows.” So I leave you with this Halloween chant and wish for you a very woo-woo season—and with it an orientation to your work that is open and freeing and even freewheeling, and may you never feel the need to apologize for the magic.

Music credit: Eerie Mansion (Dark Gloomy Atmosphere Mysterious Cinematic Halloween Music) by Audiorezout