Just been reading an article about Muriel Spark by Susan Eilenberg - she says:

Spark's fiction seems not merely to recall her life but - just slightly too often - to predict it or to draw on an impossibly later knowledge

While hesitating to compare myself to Muriel Spark, this has often happened to me, too. It frightens me, because the things written about in advance, whether obliquely or directly (e.g. my father dying, my mother losing her mind) are usually bad things. Occasionally I've censored myself because of this. But recently I've been trying to think more positively - OK, this thing might happen, but writing won't cause it to happen. (Or will it?!).

I don't think I'm psychic. There's just, for me, some kind of weird link between writing and 'knowing in advance'.

Have you experienced anything similar?

Frances

Frances,

Not to do with writing, no, but did you see my post about the dream I had before going to London?

As an adolescent, I 'knew' things, and then they came true.

My boyfriend wanted to get his gran some flowers before we went to visit her in hospital, and we had this almighty argument because I told him not to bother, (I knew she had died, don't ask me how, but I didn't tell him she had).
Anyway, he bought the flowers, and we made our way to her ward, to be greeted with his dad who looked at the flowers and said 'you're too late with them son, she died half an hour ago.'

She'd only had a fall.
I told someone to check their right rear tyre on their car because it had a slow puncture, and after a lot of nagging they took it to a garage, sure enough they did have a slow puncture.

I did lots of stuff like that for about 6 years, then as suddenly as it came, it stopped again. I have no explanation, don't really believe in stuff like that, so not sure what was going on.

Not quite the same, but I wrote a divorce while I was still happily married, and had no friends who were divorced, and then for various reasons put the book aside. When I came back to it, I'd been through a divorce myself, and I discovered I'd been right - it really is as I'd written it.

I don't think that was psychic powers, I think it was that I'd successfully extrapolated from what I did know of marriage to imagine what it would be like when it went wrong.

In fact, that was the moment when I realised that I could be a writer, because I could write about things beyond my direct experience.

Emma

Katarina, sounds as if you definitely did have psychic powers for a while! Spooky!

Emma, yes, I wonder if "successful extrapolation" is what really I'm talking about?

Muriel Spark again -

As she notes in Curriculum Vitae, her 1992 memoir, Spark has always regarded her imagination as 'a definite "something beyond myself", a source of 'knowledge that I couldn't possibly have gained through normal channels'.

I posed a similar question a while ago. As something truly odd happens to me when I’m “in the zone”. If I write religiously for a while I notice a marked increase in déjà vu, to the point where it’s almost precognitive, in fact its quite scary.

I say scary because the only rational explanation is that I’m having temporary black outs when I go dawdling off into book land without realising it.

For example, I swear, once I knew someone was about to knock a mug of the kitchen table, I was turning to warn them when it happened. (However, the likely explanation goes like this: While I was doing to washing up, did I get so immersed in thinking about my book I didn’t realise the cup had hit the floor already, I turned around “knowing” it was going to happen and déjà vu?).

Grinder

Strange because I had exactly the same thought yesterday when I read through the first draft of one of my novels and something I had written about subsequently happened. I have noticed this a few times with my writing but I let events take their natural course. I have often wondered about the prophetic powers of writing or whether one can anticipate future events. I think as a writer one is finely tuned to reality and so you are naturally more susceptible to future trends.

Frances,

I had an eery feeling that you were going to ask that question...

smudger

Ha ha, smudger!

Frances

I am in the middle myself, Traveller, though your point often bugs me. Friends often ask me 'how did you know that?'. Sometimes, I just 'know' things, and I can't explain it. In my latest book, I wrote about violence on the London Underground two weeks before the bombing, and a great flood catasrophe a week before New Orleans. Coincindence? Possibly.

But if you subscribe to the belief that as writers we are spiritually tuned to the creative powers of the universe, then perhaps it is possible to catch inklings of coming events. Like cows who know rain is coming, an instinctive kind of human premonition that we are all privy too, but some people listen to their intuition more closely - consciously or unconsciousley.

Of course, it may just be lucky circumstance.

JB

<Added>

And, of course, terrible spelling. ;(

I would ask the obvious question: are you just remembering events that tally with your writing more than ones that don't?

It stands to reason that, if someone is using their imagination a lot, there will be occasions when they come up with a situation or sequence of events that subsequently turn up in the real world. Okay, a complete sequence of events might not tally exactly, but it might come close enough to seem eerily similar. When that happens, I think there is a tendency to remember the apparent coincidence; but, of course, there is no corresponding reason to remember imaginings and events that don't tally.

In other words, could it be selective memory (in a subconscious sense, not in the sense of being deliberately selective)?

Having said that, I have had precognitive experiences of sorts, on occasion. For example, when the police came calling at my flat once, I knew before they spoke that they had come to tell me my Dad had died. But he had been ill with his heart for a while, and was in hospital, so it didn't exactly require Mystic Meg to foresee what the police might be there for.

Personally, I place more weight on the "subconsciously perceived cue" explanation, rather than the "supernatural powers" one. I don't exclude the possibility that some people may sometimes know things they ought not, but I think most examples of precognition are down to the subconscious mind's amazing ability to watch and monitor without us realising.


Alex

It always happens to me! I wrote about so many things that end up happening in my life - in songs and fiction.

I can testify to the fact, Wax knows things!

Cath

Yes and no.

Yes I know I do.

But I'm probably wrong.

My most vivid memory of this was waking up one night from a nightmare. I dreamt I was looking at a friends picture and the glass of the picture frame was smashed to tiny pieces. She was in a bad car smash that night and was thrown outside of the car. Her only injuries were from fragments of glass.

I have heard the act of writing described as 'talking to the dead.' That is what if feels like sometimes.

Bill

That story made the tiny hairs on the back of my neck prickle up Bill!

And Cath - yeah, I forgot about that instance. There are a few others, but don't understand it myself. I guess the devil of it is none of us will ever know for sure.

JB

Yes, I think writing is extremely powerful as a predictor,and this thread reminds me of various books I've read and thoughts I've had about predicting your own future by visualisation and such. There's lots written about how life turns out as you conceive, or predict, or visualise. On the whole, barring natural disasters and the like, it seems to be true. Have you see the film series called 'Seven Up', which follows the lives of people interviewed at seven-year intervals? It's uncanny to see how far seven year olds articulate their own futures. It's not exactly supernatural, but the power of self-suggestion plays as much a part - or is perhaps indistinguishable from - social engineering.

The phrase 'self-fulfilling prophesies' was bandied about a lot when I was teaching. I used to love it when a seventeen year old student would say something like 'I want to have my own hairdressing business', or 'I'd like to go to University' in a very hesitant fashion, perhaps because it seemed to them too bold. It was an opportunatiy to tell them that if that was what they wanted, that is what would happen.

The idea of an extrapolation is useful - I tend to think in terms of continued trajectory: once something starts it's hard to stop the momentum, and you can sometimes see where things are leading right from the beginning. You can sometimes pull together threads of unconscious knowledge to give you insight into how things might turn out.

With external events, things over which you have no control, it's possible that writers catch the seeds of things as they germinate, just because they train themselves to be watchful.

I also think writers tend to 'author' their own life-stories -I know I do mine. The one thing that really irked me as a child was the idea that I had very little control over events. Perhaps writers have more vivid imaginations, and maybe I have a ruthless streak. I know I am always shocked when people don't make New Year Resolutions and Five Year Plans ( ah! those self-help boks, again.)'How on earth do you have any control over your lives?' I ask.'Do you mean it's all just random?'

The phrase I'm least likely to use: ' I rely on the kindness of strangers.'

Sheila

Not sure but somehow I knew you were all going to post what you have posted.