Even for the most analytic of us the creative process is intuitive to some extent. I’m way over on the analytic end of the spectrum, and I still surprise myself constantly when scenes don’t go the way I’d thought, or characters say or do things in the moment of writing that I’ve never planned. There are choices I make in the writing because they “feel right,” rather than because I’ve thought through all the logical consequences for the story.

Some writers are over on the other end of the spectrum; their primary mode of operation is intuitive, rather than analytic. For them, it’s the thinking and planning parts that are the “once in a while” things that don’t come easily.

A lot of folks seem to think that intuition is something that “just is,” rather than something you can acquire. But a two-year-old doesn’t have any intuition about pacing or plot or characterization. Neither do most seven-year-olds. Intuition is something that people acquire over time; it may be a subconscious synthesis of experience, but it still depends on experience.

And that means that intuition can be trained, or at least influenced, according to what sort of experience one has. This is what’s behind all the urging to read lots of good books and well-written stories – so that you fill up your backbrain with examples of good writing, in hopes that it will use them when it comes time for you to work on your own stories.

But experience in reading is not quite the same as experience with writing. There certainly is plenty of stuff that we absorb about storytelling and writing techniques from reading, but there are also things where observation isn’t enough. One may recognize that a writer’s dialog is great without quite getting exactly how they did it, or absorb the way the pace picks up toward the climax without absorbing the techniques for doing it.

This leads me to two conclusions: first, that being an intuitive writer does not mean one cannot and should not be an analytical reader; and second, that practice in writing is perhaps even more necessary for the intuitive writer than it is for the highly analytical one.

I’m not saying that one ought never to read for fun, without paying much attention to what the writer is doing or how she is doing it, nor that the only sort of reading a prospective writer ought to do should be of the “improving” variety. But I think that it is often well worthwhile to go back to one’s favorite writers and observe the mechanics of one’s favorite bits, with particular attention to the parts one didn’t notice or care about in the for-fun read-through.

I once had an argument with a gentleman over the use and misuse of exposition, a.k.a. infodumps. He took the common position that one ought never, ever, ever to use them; exposition was bad writing per se. I asked him if he’d ever read James White’s Sector General novels. He said he had, and they proved his point; there was no exposition in them, not anywhere at all. I asked him to go home and read one of them again, paying particular attention to what was actually going on, writing-wise, during the scenes in which the doctors are being briefed on the puzzling new cases that they are going to be dealing with for the rest of the novel.

He did, and came back half-appalled and half-apologetic. Because White segues from fully-dramatized “showing” to exposition and back in those scenes, so smoothly that this reader had never noticed that they contained two to five pages of exposition right in the middle of the scene.

If this reader had never actually studied those scenes to find out what the writer was really doing, I can see one of two things happening: either he’d have tried to write without any exposition at all, ever, never recognizing when it could work or realizing how to make it work; or his intuition would keep trying to make him write exposition (because he’d subconsciously absorbed some of White’s technique) and he’d keep fighting with it and never would get it right because he didn’t know he could do that.

So my first recommendation to intuitive writers is the same as everyone else’s: read a lot. But I’d go a step farther and say, from time to time, stop (or go back) and study your favorite bits by your favorite writers. Do at least some analytical reading, and see if it makes a difference. If it doesn’t, stop…but at least give it a try.

My second recommendation is to be observant about your own process. What gets your writing juices flowing? Do you get into things faster if you start your writing session by reading something good – a favorite passage by someone else, or some poetry? Or do you work best when you don’t look at anyone else’s stuff before you write some of your own? What about other things? I know a fair number of writers who make themselves a sound track of various music that gets them in the mood for the book they’re working on, but what about pictures?

If you watch yourself, you may find that music isn’t your thing, but a slide show of pictures on your computer may be just what you need. When I was working on The Mislaid Magician, I changed my computer wallpaper to a period map of England. Every time I turned it on, it reminded me of what I was working on, and it helped.

My third recommendation is one that I personally would hate, and I wouldn’t blame you for not trying it, but here it is: do some writing exercises. If intuition is trained by practice, and you want to train it to do the right things, then deliberately working on exercises that target techniques you’re not good at may work like playing scales on the piano (I hated those, too), as a way of making “doing this right” a habit that you don’t have to think about when you get to work on your pay copy.

Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment, especially if things aren’t moving. Because if they aren’t moving anyway, it’s not going to hurt to try something radical, like writing the last scene first or drawing stick-figure diagrams of how the rest of the plot might go, or dressing up in costume to write the next scene. If it works, it works, and you don’t have to admit to anyone that that’s what you did if you’re embarrassed about it. This is one of the good things about writing being a solitary occupation.

And one last thing: remember that I’m mainly an analytical writer. Most of this comes from observation of other writers who are more intuitive than I am, so if you are an intuitive writer and you try it and it doesn’t work, do something else. Whatever your intuition tells you.

9 Comments
  1. I like writing exercises. Mainly because I always “translate” them into something that interests me. For example, a few months ago, I tackled an assignment to write a story opening about “Steve in a restaurant.”

    That basic idea bored me. But when I turned it into an SF piece in a restaurant offering not food, but metamorphosis, I felt energized and inspired.

    I like your idea of getting into costume to write! Never occurred to me, never would have occurred to me. But I’m curious to see what would happen!

    I love analyzing the writing of authors I admire, but I believe I am primarily an intuitive writer. I write what feels right. This used to mean that when I got stuck, I got really stuck. Now I brainstorm possibilities from my analytical side, as many as possible, even crazy things that don’t fit, but only choose an option when it feels right. I keep going until something does feel right.

  2. I know that I started reading books differently once I started to write novels on my own. I read a lot before, but now when I read, I’m more analytical and it has certainly helped with my writing.

    I’m definitely more intuitive of a writer, and my hardest scenes (the ones I have to rewrite most often) are usually the ones that require more planning and thought.

  3. Okay, do you in fact have a data tap on my brain? 😉 I was just thinking this morning about how nice it would be if someone would talk about my sort of process….

    either he’d have tried to write without any exposition at all, ever, never recognizing when it could work or realizing how to make it work; or his intuition would keep trying to make him write exposition (because he’d subconsciously absorbed some of White’s technique) and he’d keep fighting with it and never would get it right because he didn’t know he could do that.

    That’s not so much a problem with being intuitive, IMO, as it is not being intuitive enough; your infodump-hating writer would be trying to force an analytical rule into an intuitive process, and tripping himself up worse than a lefty trying to tie his shoes right-handed. If you’re way over on the extreme intuitive end of the spectrum (as I am), the rules just sound silly from the first time you hear them — obviously no one actually writes that way, and there’s no reason to even think about a bunch of silly “rules” when you can just write whatever sounds right and it’ll be fine. (And then you get out in the world and discover that yes, actually, a lot of people do write that way, and you shake your head and marvel at the diversity of human brains.)

    The thing that analytical reading (as well as talking with more analytical writers) is good for is to give us extreme-intuitives a set of tools to use when intuition isn’t enough. Because while intuition is a great way to write (says I), when it fails, it tends to fail completely and intractably — it’s hard to figure out why something isn’t working when you don’t consciously know why you were doing it in the first place. That’s when all that thinking and planning stuff comes in handy; I may only need it 5% of the time (which is good, because writing analytically is hard!), but 95% of a story is… not a story.

    My second recommendation is to be observant about your own process.

    I think this is excellent advice for any type of writer. Figure out what works for you — which is not always intuitive, even for us intuitive types! And yes, definitely try new things, and track what effect they have; the oddest things can turn out to be useful, either all the time or in certain circumstances.

    Personally, I avoid writing exercises with extreme prejudice, but that’s because they tend to turn into ideas for novels. And it’s not like I have any shortage of those.

  4. @LizV “Personally, I avoid writing exercises with extreme prejudice, but that’s because they tend to turn into ideas for novels.”

    Hah! Too true! My latest batch of writing exercises has generated another 8 story openings that I’m longing to turn into completed stories. Half are likely short stories (or novellas), but the other half are novels, and I can’t write that fast! Aargh! 😀

  5. This should really come with a warning, that it will change how you read forever, that once you get into the analytic mind frame, it will keep slipping back even in the midst of pleasure reading.

  6. Mary: Yes! Sometimes I can turn it off, and sometimes I can’t. There have been times when I’ve stopped reading a book not because it was so terrible, but because I couldn’t stop analyzing what was wrong. They were minor points, and I should have been able to ignore them, but I just couldn’t.

  7. Shannon, that is where your WSOD died. Personally, I do not like it when I bounce from a story, but do not know why. I would much rather know why I did not like it.

    I can read on two levels. One is the “naive” reader, and the other is the analyst. I can be enjoying a book as a reader even as, from the analyst viewpoint, I spot the techniques by which the effects are being created.

  8. “or dressing up in costume to write the next scene.”

    I’ve been stuck on this tricky part of my wip for almost 2 weeks now. Reading that gave me the idea to wash/style my hair and dress in my nicer clothes.

    -_-

    Still can’t believe that actually worked.

  9. Dear Pat,

    You rock!

    That is all.

    filkferengi