The Intuitive Writer

From Jane Friedman’s blog: The Secret Sauce for Writers: Intuition

[Intuition], 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. … 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. Imagination, meanwhile, is your unique perspective, your ability to make unexpected connections, to see the world in a way no one else does. It’s what allows you to take familiar concepts and combine them in new and exciting ways.

In other words, experience counts and uninformed “intuition” is just guesswork.

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.

This all sounds right to me. I think that’s a good definition of intuition when used in the phrase “intuitive writer,” and I think the stress on experience as a reader — what that means — is also appropriate emphasis.

The rest of the linked post is about developing intuition. Seven suggestions. Again, they all sound like good suggestions to me. Not surprising suggestions, but good ones — read widely, and pay attention to what you’re reading. Write a lot, and deliberately try different things in your writing, and pay attention to how (or whether) those things work. I’m summarizing, but that’s what she’s saying. She is discussing trying things like trying to write in different pov or styles. I agree.

This is also making me think of the Death’s Lady trilogy, which I wrote an amazingly long time ago — it seems like a long time ago to me, anyway. The oldest files I have, the ones marked “earlier versions” and “outdated” and things like that — have dates from 2006. That means I wrote the original version of that trilogy before I wrote City. Which I guess I did. I’d almost forgotten that.

That was a project that involved never-ending revision and yes, I sure remember that. But my point is, I had just read Dunnett’s Lymond series and I wanted to try that, I mean separated the role of the protagonist from the pov role. That was all about reading attentively and deliberately trying things. All that revision was also about whether things worked and making them work better.

And all the time, I was channeling a protagonist who isn’t me and isn’t much like me — I mean Daniel here, though of course this is true of both the pov characters in the original trilogy, and the protagonist as well. People are always asking things like, “How can you write a male protagonist?” and I’m always answering, “Do you really think that’s the only important difference between the author and the protagonist or pov character? How do you write someone who’s twenty years older, forty years older? Or younger? How do you write someone from a completely different background? How do you write someone who’s deeply committed to a profession that isn’t yours?

I mean, I’m not only not a psychiatrist, I don’t think I’ve ever talked much with any psychiatrists. I’ve never had a close friend who was a psychiatrist. I’ve never been in therapy or counseling either. At the time I wrote the DL trilogy, I’d been reading a lot of books about psychiatry and psychology, including books that modeled the therapeutic attitude. Obviously it made sense to make Daniel the pov character when I already knew I was going to separate the pov from the protagonist, I just channeled an idea of a good psychiatrist, and that means I was certainly deliberately trying to do something I hadn’t done before. First contemporary setting I ever tried, too.

Here’s a previous post about intuitive writers.

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