Questions, Assumptions, and Trusting Your Backbrain

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

I never had any formal academic training in writing novels. I barely have any training in analyzing and interpreting literature—my  last English course was my senior year in high school. When it comes to writing, I’m pretty much self-taught.

I do have some small experience with workshops, but those, too, were mainly amateur hour, not classroom versions facilitated by a professor or expert. My first writing “workshop” was a self-selected group of six (eventually seven) unpublished would-be writers. We had three members who had taken college level English and fiction-writing classes, and they influenced the initial setup of our group’s critiquing process, but with no authority “in charge,” we tweaked and changed procedures over time, as we figured out what worked for us and what didn’t.

Consequently, I spend a fair amount of time reading (and talking and writing) about the process part of writing, which in turn informs a lot of my thinking about the kinds of questions it is useful to ask about one’s own writing, compared to the kinds of questions it is useful to have other people ask.

And one of the things I have noticed, over time, is that the questions writers get told to ask about their own work (and each others’) often contain a lot of assumptions about both the writer’s intentions and the writing process.

I’m not talking about questions like “What just happened in this scene?” or “Where did the gun come from?” Those are, at base, questions that point to what the reader did or didn’t understand about a scene.

I’m talking about questions whose purpose is more ambiguous, such as “Why did you have this event happen at this point in the story?” or “What was your goal/purpose (or the character’s goal or purpose) for this scene?” or “Why did you choose this structure/what would happen if you changed the structure?” or “What if this scene/action came before that one instead of after?”

These questions are ambiguous because sometimes they’re expressions of reader confusion, or of a reaction to a scene that a reader doesn’t quite know how to express in any other terms. Other times, they’re suggestions in disguise. The questions can be extremely useful at times, especially if a writer is trying to pin down something that “feels wrong” by starting with a broad focus and slowly narrowing down the problem point.

But much of the time, these questions depend on a fundamental assumption about the writer’s process: namely, that writers know (or should know) the why of every detail and decision in a story. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a college professor, a writing group, or the writer themself who is asking the question. As long as the questioner expects the writer’s answer to involve a conscious, deliberate, logical decision or plan, there’s a potential problem.

The problem arises because writing a novel involves so many decisions that many, if not most, writers inevitably make the majority of those choices intuitively. A writer who is being pushed (by their group, their professor, or their personal Internal Editor) to have a clear, logically-thought-out justification for every single alternative is very likely to end up making some bad decisions because they are being told (by their group, their professor, or their Internal Editor) that they are not allowed to trust their backbrain.

Take the question “Why did this event happen at this point in the story?” I consider myself an analytical, planner-type writer, but about half the time, my answer is “Because it felt more right than what I had planned.” (Or just “because it felt right.”) Another quarter to thirty percent of the time, the answer would probably be “because when I was writing the scene, I suddenly realized that the thing you asked about was the perfect way to handle something and/or set up something that’s coming up.” Only about twenty to twenty-five percent of the time would I be able to say “Because I planned for it to be there for X, Y, and Z reasons.”

Similarly, asking “What would happen if this character did B instead of A?” almost always leaves me blinking and saying either “But they wouldn’t do B” or “Then they’d have to be somebody else entirely, in a completely different story about something else, which is not what I’m writing.”

I’ve been in situations where the questioner would not accept “Because it feels right” or “Because this is what they would do” as an answer. Very occasionally, such … persistence … has made me dig deeper into a character’s motivation or a chain of plot causality. Most often, though, it feels like being interrogated by people who have already made up their minds about what I was trying to do, why they think I made the decision I made, why it was wrong, and what I should do instead…and who think they have the authority to command me to write my story their way.

The problem isn’t the initial question; it’s the refusal to take “My backbrain told me so” as an answer.

Writers can do this kind of damage themselves when they second-guess their own decisions simply because they are based on a feeling, and not on a neat list of plot points and character traits, or a structural template they can check off by page count. It’s bad enough when other people tell writers not to trust their intuition; it’s much worse when a writer talks him/herself out of trusting it.

The catch, of course, comes from that small percentage of the time when one of these questions knocks a hole in a mental wall, and one’s backbrain catches a glimpse of a fascinating, fun tangle of new possibilities on the other side. That’s why these kinds of questions are useful . . . as long as “because this way felt right/better” is one of the acceptable answers.