Intuition and Writing

 KimBoo York's The Secret Sauce for Writers: Intuition on Jane Friedman's blog takes on something I know I have not read before, and not thought of.

It took a long time for me to realize that I was not the problem. Becca Syme in her book Dear Writer: Are You Intuitive? describes intuition as a form of pattern recognition. It’s not a “gut feeling,” as it is so often described. In fact, it is not a feeling at all. It is your brain connecting dots so quickly that you are not aware of the connections until you look backward to figure out why you know what you know, or did what you did.

I think that is a good start for a definition of creative intuition, and I highly recommend that book for all writers, but I knew there was more to it.

When I was recording a recent episode of Around the Writer’s Table podcast, my co-hosts asked me what my definition of intuition is. I intuitively answered: “It is the combination of experience and imagination.”

I want to stress that experience isn’t just about how many books you’ve read or how long you’ve been writing. It’s about the depth of your engagement with stories, both as a reader and a writer. It’s about understanding narrative structures, character arcs, pacing, dialogue, and all the other elements that make up a good story. It’s about knowing the rules so well that you can break them effectively.

 Intuition as unconscious pattern recognition is not a new concept for me. I put experience and imagination together with intuition in any conscious way.

I know I had not thought about the depth of my engagement with my stories. After all the scribbling and all the typing and the revising, I would think that I was deeply involved with my writing. But there has been a recurring thing where after all the scribbling and typing, I see a different way of doing the story. That happened last week at work with an old short story that has been a problem since I first wrote it - one that no one liked.

I know the spark that set off this new revision - something I read about Nabokov and writing ecstatically. The story I just mentioned began as "Mr. Morgan" and is now out as "The Rational Actor." It was meant to fill in a hole in my story about a small Indiana town, telling how the out-of-state owner of its major employer closes down its operations. I focused on the person who had been born in the town, and who came to run the company.  He finds out about the proposed closing and decides that he is not going to be the victim along with everyone else. That he cannot prevent the sale is his failure, and he does not want to be around to be seen as the failure, he is also tired of bucking economic trends. Both versions were told in the third person.

The new person revision will be in the first person. My intent was to write a fictional history using case studies. Emotional depth was not in the forefront of my brain; people were enduring the economic upending of their lives by repression. However, I came to sew while scrubbing pans, the only way to reach the ecstatic with this story was through the first person.

Back to the original essay, I do have a voice in my head whenever I am writing questioning if I am straying into cliché; which I take as my counterpart to the following:

In my post What Is the Worst that Could Happen? I discuss how discovery writers can get ourselves out of a jam by imagining not what should happen next but the absolutely worst thing that could happen next. As an example, I used the tired old trope of a knight rescuing a princess/prince/princette from a dragon.

And another reminder to read, but a warning for me - to start freeing up my imagination. That I may pay too much attention to the typing of the text more than the text worries me. It seems to me that would be the stymying of the imagination by the mechanical.

This is why you hear me saying a lot that intuition (and discovery writing) can be developed, and that studying the craft of writing is critical. As writers, we must read widely as well as study our genre of choice; we must engage in critical analysis of texts; we must put in the time to improve our craft.

But knowledge alone does not create amazing stories. At some point, we have to learn to trust our intuition by allowing our imagination to engage with our experience.

sch 9/14