Trusting your gut

Understanding how stories work improves one’s ability to put them together better. What many people don’t get is that “understanding” can be intuitive as well as—or instead of—analytical/intellectual. Both ways of understanding are subject to error. The “gut feel” that X is the right thing to do in a story may have more to do with what the writer wants to do or not do than with what actually feels right and works for the story. Analytical approaches can end up forcing a story into whatever shape the analysis comes up with as “the right one” instead of following the natural flow of the story.

Analytical approaches to writing are usually developed after-the-fact, rather than during the process of putting things together. It’s a lot easier to analyze what’s already written than it is to analyze something that is still a nebulous feeling in the back of the writer’s head. This makes it even easier to ignore instinct and intuition as a basis for making choices in the writing moment, because the later analysis tends to discount and devalue everything but logic.

I have never read an analysis of a book where “the writer felt like this was the right choice” was given as a possible explanation for why the author had something happen. Analytical explanations keep digging—why did the writer “feel like” this was right? Eventually they come up with a reason that satisfies the intellect—the writer did X to get Y effect—which makes the intuitive “gut feel” sound like a carefully reasoned, conscious decision…which then intimidates beginning and experienced writers alike by insinuating that a gut feeling isn’t enough; their important writing decisions need to have that carefully worked out, conscious reason before they can be sure that it’s the “right one.”

The thing is, writers’ gut feeling for story nearly always has a lot more training than their ability to analyze and decide what a story “should” do next. Because writers read. I have never met a writer who didn’t love reading. I have never met a writer who hadn’t read massive quantities of books and stories, usually starting from the time they learned how to read in the first place. Reading lots of books—good, bad, and indifferent—over the years provides a writer with thousands of examples of what works and what doesn’t.

Most people don’t have to perform a formal analysis of a novel in order to see that the ending fell flat, or parts of it felt rushed, or what happened to the character wasn’t satisfying. Similarly, they don’t have to scrutinize every paragraph to notice that they got so involved in a story that they stayed up all night reading. Those writers may not know exactly what the author of the book did or didn’t do to make them like or dislike the way the story went, but they know what it felt like as a reader.

And that’s what instinct and intuition are: the feeling that something you’re writing is working (or not working) on some fundamental level that you can’t explain at the moment. It is extremely frustrating—the writer can get trapped in an endless cycle of “It feels right, but what if it isn’t?” or “I think it’s wrong, but I don’t know why. What if I wreck it by trying to fix something that isn’t broken?”

One of the first things I had to learn about writing, back forty-some years ago, was to trust my instincts. I refer to this as “my backbrain is much smarter than I am.” After forty years, my writing process looks a lot more analytical than it used to (and it always has looked fairly analytical, because that’s the way I roll in general). A lot of this is simply because, after all these years, I have finally managed to learn how to see (sometimes, at least occasionally) the logical reasons that underlay the gut feeling. I can recognize (sometimes, occasionally) why I think something feels right or feels wrong.

But my gut feeling was right long before I could say why it was right.