LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS…OR NOT

LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS…OR NOT

I’ve been working on a new book the past few weeks, and last week, I abruptly hit a wall where the story didn’t feel right. It was as if the train just jumped off the tracks and refused to move forward any more.

I’ve learned over the years to recognize this as a sure signal that my story has taken a wrong turn. It’s time for me to stop, go back to thinking about the plot of the story, the overall arc of the characters, and the relationship between the characters. There’s a fatal flaw somewhere in the mix.

It’s a waste of my time to keep writing forward until I figure out where I’ve gone wrong. I have to circle back and fix the problem before my story will flow naturally again.

Yay! I listen to my instincts and they save me every time. Right? Maybe not.

So here’s the thing. You have to know enough about story structure and character development and relationship dynamics and a host of other technical aspects of story writing to correctly identify where the story has gone off track in the first place.

Some people have a sense of story rhythm developed from lots of reading, or maybe from a family of storytellers, or maybe from actual instinctive knack for it. But I humbly think this is the exception rather than the rule.

This is my pitch for reading books on how-to-write, for taking classes, workshops, or seminars on writing, and for learning the technical craft of storytelling. It’s not fun, and it’s not glamorous, but it is important to be able to deconstruct your story either before, during, or after the drafting process to discover its critical weaknesses.

Plotters, of course, will love this advice. They’re all about being organized before they put sentences on paper.

Pantsers, however, may hate this advice. Thing is, I’m not telling pantsers to force themselves to write in a technical way. I’m saying pantsers need to have enough knowledge stored in their mental hurricane of creativity for their instincts to warn them when they’re drifting off course.

Both types of writers would do well to develop an acute and sensitive feeling for when the story isn’t going well. It’s something to specifically watch out for as you write.

I think this sense of intuitively feeling problems in the story structure is one of the skills that distinguishes successful writers from those who struggle to get stories right.

How to develop it? Learn the craft! For most people, this “intuition” has nothing to do with actual intuition at the end of the day. It has to do with having enough knowledge to spot a big story problem right as it starts to unfold instead of writing hundreds more draft pages before realizing your story doesn’t work.

Writers talk about this skill in words like instinct and intuition, but ultimately, it’s a learned ability. It’s a synthesis of technical knowledge and your creative “feel” for your story. You need BOTH.