Training Your Writing Intuition

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

“Intuition” is generally defined as the ability to know or understand something by instinct, without conscious reasoning or analysis. It’s an important piece of the writing process for the vast majority of writers, no matter how analytical they normally are. How important, and in what way, depends on where the writer’s process sits on the scale that goes from “highly analytical/planner” to “highly intuitive/pantser.”

Because intuition is so often seen as the opposite of analysis and planning, people often assume that it just is—it’s something people have, that can’t be learned or trained. 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.

Logically, then, if intuition develops over time through experience, then more experience will aid in developing intuition. Infants learn about plot and pacing and characterization initially by listening to their parents read or tell them stories. Later, they learn from reading, watching, listening, and telling their own stories (and finding out that “the dog ate my homework” does not pass the believability test).

This is why so much writing advice talks about reading good books and well-written stories—the idea is to fill your backbrain with good examples that will all come together when one starts writing. I personally think that one should read a lot of books—good, bad, and indifferent—and let one’s backbrain decide for itself what things seem to work and what doesn’t. (See previous post about “good writing”…)

However, reading is not the same as writing. Reading widely can train your backbrain to spot problems like dragging pace, wooden characters, stilted dialog, and plot holes, but seeing these things does not train your intuition in the next step, which is figuring out how to fix them.

Figuring out how to fix things takes practice. I’m on the analytical end of the scale, so for me, the first step was learning how to read for technique (“How did this favorite writer of mine make this cool scene work? Oh…the viewpoint character is saying one thing, but reacting mentally to what other characters are doing…Oh, the sentences get shorter and simpler when the villain pulls out the knife and the action starts…”). The second step was deliberately trying out whatever I’d spotted in whatever I was writing.

Other writers I know have gotten this practice by writing the proverbial million words of junk, doing writing exercises, writing fanfiction, or, in one memorable case, simply copying one of their favorite author’s works out by hand (bypassing the conscious analysis part even at the reading stage) in a series of notebooks.

Filling up one’s backbrain, paying deliberate attention to one’s experience, and actively practicing in whatever way suits your process are still just the first half of training your intuition, though. In my personal experience, the second (and possibly more important) half is also about paying attention…but this time, it’s not about paying attention to what you’re putting in. It’s paying attention to what is trying to get out.

In my personal experience, this means, first, recognizing that my intuition is trying to tell me something (often something I don’t want to hear), and second, letting it guide me toward whatever it’s telling me. This isn’t easy. My first reaction to that intuitive sense that “something is off about this story” is almost always denial or resistance.

It’s taken me fifty-some years to admit that ignoring that niggling sense of something being off just wastes time and makes it harder for my intuition to kick in the next time I need it. But the converse is also true: the more often I pay attention to that “something’s off” feeling, the more often it shows up. The more often I sit staring at a part of the story that I think looks fine, but that “feels off,” the more often I manage figure out what’s wrong in a reasonable amount of time.

I’m still working on turning off the analytical side of my writing brain long enough to see where and what the problem is. Usually, this is because I think I know, or should know, that the problem is with X scene, character, or plot twist, when that niggly feeling keeps wanting me to look at Y dialog or setup or different character.

My issue is that I want to know (or think I know) exactly what the problem is before I do anything, but the feeling is about where I need to look. I’m much more comfortable with the analytical “what” part than the where (especially since it is usually going to be more work to start with where and, eventually, realize that the “what” isn’t the thing I thought it was at all.

The thing about intuition (again, from personal experience) is that the less one demonstrates trust in it (by denying it, ignoring it, or resisting it), the less it’ll try to tell you things. It’s like a muscle—use it or lose it—except that I haven’t figured out any way to make it pop things up when I want them. It doesn’t work on demand. If I want better intuition, I have to recognize it and accept it, and the more often I do this (and the sooner I do it), the better and more often it comes back and works for me. Sometimes even if I only admit (months later) that I shouldn’t have ignored it all this time, it helps (but it works better if I follow my intuition when it shows up, instead of waiting that long).