Writing the Brain: Part 2 - Neuroscience and creativity with Sue WoolfeWriting the Brain: Part 2 - Neuroscience and creativity with Sue Woolfe
All In The Mind
Acclaimed novelist Sue Woolfe, author of Leaning Towards Infinity, found herself mystified by her own mind as she wrestled with narrative of her book, The Secret Cure: a tale of love, science and autism. She set out to answer a question troubling her, 'What are people who sit in rooms making up stories doing with their minds?' She lays her writer's psyche bare to discuss shame, subversion, control and the creative process. A rare glimpse inside the mind's eye of a storyteller.
44:39•2 Jun 2007
Inside a Writer’s Wayward Mind: Sue Woolfe on Neuroscience and Creativity
Episode Overview
- Creative work may require suspending judgment and allowing "loose construing" rather than clinging to rigid plans.
- Trying to stay in tight, conscious control can make fiction feel "stifled, artificial and counterfeit".
- Neuroscience ideas, such as emotions tagging ideas, can help make sense of why stories eventually seem to order themselves.
- Accepting anxiety and long periods of apparent chaos is part of sustaining large creative projects over many years.
- Keeping the inner critic away during drafting – for example, by delaying editing – can stop you cutting the very contradictions a story needs.
“"I discovered that I couldn't create fiction when I was in conscious control of it... I had to put my own mind out of control."”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? Here, that question is tackled from a sideways angle, through the unruly mind of a novelist trying to understand her own brain. ABC RN’s All In The Mind zooms in on Australian writer Sue Woolfe, who became stuck partway through her novel *The Secret Cure* and, instead of reaching for "a bottle of gin", turned to neuroscience for help.
Wrestling with thousands of messy draft pages – her "igloo from the inside" – she wanted to know: "What are we storytellers doing in our minds?" Speaking with host Natasha Mitchell, Woolfe talks frankly about shame, chaos and the strange mental states behind fiction. She explains her idea of two kinds of thinking: "tight construing" (goal‑driven, logical, plan-heavy) and "loose construing", a wild, amoral state where judgment is suspended and ideas spill up from somewhere beyond conscious control.
She jokes about answering the phone mid‑writing and briefly not knowing who she is. Neuroscience, especially Antonio Damasio’s work, gives her a language for this. She lights up at the notion that ideas and characters are "emotionally tagged", suggesting that as emotions accumulate across years of drafting, scenes eventually feel as though they "form themselves". The result looks orderly, even though the process felt like madness.
The conversation ranges from the mysterious lab cleaning lady who hijacked her imagination, to anxious years lost in dead‑end plot, to the blissful "high" when everything finally clicks. It’s funny, self-deprecating and very honest, with plenty here for anyone who writes, reads, teaches or just wonders why their own mind feels so unruly at times.
If you’ve ever felt guilty for being messy, stuck or scared of your own ideas, this candid peek into a writer’s brain might make you ask: what if the chaos is exactly where the good stuff starts?
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