Instinct v Intellect: What the Writer Must Know

 Writing is a dance between the instinct and the intellect, between vision, dream, a sense of story and the power of the mind to make sense, to figure out, to order. Both are magical and necessary ingredients in creation. But they tend to battle each other—at least in me they do.

As with all conflict, energy-generating opportunity lies within the conflict between intellect and instinct. We learn to move back and forth between blind groping, relaxed trust, unspooling and mapping, charting rough seas, putting ballast on the corners of the story.

One requires allowing, breath, space, trust. The other requires care and attention: being alert to connections, girding structure, getting excited at the strength of shapes, of right angles and triangles, and of patterns, of echoes and juxtapositions.

It is this dance, this balance, that my Craft Your Draft Class honors. It begins with power of the examples I pull from a story I just read in The New Yorker, a book I couldn’t put down, a scene I still remember many years later. I open these down the middle so we can dig around in the inner organs of them and glean . . . well, magic.

Then there is space to write in the held context of the group. Other pens scratching, keyboards making their quiet clicks, breath. We are creating, separately and together—how we long for just that combination in our lives, and here we find it every week.

And then we read. In pairs, to the group. I bow to the instinct and herald the intellect, in my response. I reflect what we’ve seen in the example, what we learn from the newly minted words.

And you leave with inspiration for the intellect and the instinct, new scenes to type into your manuscript, new tools in your writer’s bag, a verbal commitment to the group to allow writing to take its place in your week, amidst everything else. To let it matter and enlargen you.

Doors Open Now

Join us. You may register now for one of the few remaining places left in this quarter’s Craft Classes: https://bookwritingworld.com/work-with-me/

Free Class

You are also invited to an online live class (video conference) where I will give you three examples of how the old adage, “show, don’t tell,” still drives my own writing and can greatly expand the possibilities of yours—and one example of effective use of telling, when we flip that adage on its head. Come power your instinct and your intellect. FREE Class meets this Thursday, Sept. 12 5 – 6 p.m. Pacific, 8 – 9 p.m. Eastern. Sign up for this FREE class with me NOW: https://bookwritingworld.com/free-craft-class/