Intuition and Skills Mentoring
Yesterday I wrote about the course I had just finished, Analysis and Skills Mentoring, Part 2 from the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. And it was, believe me, a useful course in a painstaking, nitpicking sort of way. As my way is generally not to nitpick, but rather to see the big picture and glance at the details, it was an excellent corrective. In its way, it sharpened my eye (and my saw, genealogist Ken Aitken would say) and gave me a better set of tools to do genealogical research (and also to reflect on my writing).
But I would be remiss if I treated it as "the only way." There is something to be said for intuition, for being able to postulate links on the flimisiest of pretexts, of thinking not only "outside the box" but outside the whole blinkin' warehouse. Sometimes those thoughts don't pan out.
I remember once spending ages looking for a guy called Martin Ralph in mid-19th century Crowan, Cornwall in a particular parish and not finding him. I postulated that if the whole family went missing (which it had), there was a good chance he emigrated. I spent quite a lot of hours looking in Wisconsin where a lot of Crowan families ended up. I never did find Martin there because he happened to be living a mile away in a different parish in Cornwall. But the intuition wasn't totally off -- I found two other families I hadn't been expecting to find, one of which added significant evidence that allowed me to decide -- for the moment at least -- which of two men of the same name had also moved to Wisconsin.
And it works in books, too. It worked in Body and Soul when Miles went next door to see Susan and she shut the door in his face. Neither Miles nor Susan -- nor I -- knew when that scene started that she would manage to break his foot while doing so. It just seemed to work. And it opened the door to further development in the book. The same sort of thing happened when I was working on The Antonides Marriage Deal. I was stuck in the book and sitting in the dentist's office (which is always a good place to think about something else) and Tallie muttered in my mind, "He wishes I'd get hit by a truck." Elias, she meant. And while he might not have wanted anything quite so drastic to happen to her, he did want her out of his office and out of his life. And intuition said, "Work with it." So Tallie got hit by a truck.
Lest you think that intuition only works on disasters (which it does), it works on other stuff, too. It is a little like orienteering without a compass, though. You tend to do it by having a vague sort of map in your head and your eye on the horizon. Sometimes you fall into bogs or stumble over rocks, but there are definite adventures and interesting things to see along the way.
I like analysis and I like having sharp tools -- and I like courses that make me sharpen them. But I also like just ambling out into the countryside with my characters, seeing where we need to go and letting them suggest the ways. Keeping my intuition open for possibilities is just as important as paying attention to all the details. In fact, when they work together it makes for a really interesting trip.
But I would be remiss if I treated it as "the only way." There is something to be said for intuition, for being able to postulate links on the flimisiest of pretexts, of thinking not only "outside the box" but outside the whole blinkin' warehouse. Sometimes those thoughts don't pan out.
I remember once spending ages looking for a guy called Martin Ralph in mid-19th century Crowan, Cornwall in a particular parish and not finding him. I postulated that if the whole family went missing (which it had), there was a good chance he emigrated. I spent quite a lot of hours looking in Wisconsin where a lot of Crowan families ended up. I never did find Martin there because he happened to be living a mile away in a different parish in Cornwall. But the intuition wasn't totally off -- I found two other families I hadn't been expecting to find, one of which added significant evidence that allowed me to decide -- for the moment at least -- which of two men of the same name had also moved to Wisconsin.
And it works in books, too. It worked in Body and Soul when Miles went next door to see Susan and she shut the door in his face. Neither Miles nor Susan -- nor I -- knew when that scene started that she would manage to break his foot while doing so. It just seemed to work. And it opened the door to further development in the book. The same sort of thing happened when I was working on The Antonides Marriage Deal. I was stuck in the book and sitting in the dentist's office (which is always a good place to think about something else) and Tallie muttered in my mind, "He wishes I'd get hit by a truck." Elias, she meant. And while he might not have wanted anything quite so drastic to happen to her, he did want her out of his office and out of his life. And intuition said, "Work with it." So Tallie got hit by a truck.
Lest you think that intuition only works on disasters (which it does), it works on other stuff, too. It is a little like orienteering without a compass, though. You tend to do it by having a vague sort of map in your head and your eye on the horizon. Sometimes you fall into bogs or stumble over rocks, but there are definite adventures and interesting things to see along the way.
I like analysis and I like having sharp tools -- and I like courses that make me sharpen them. But I also like just ambling out into the countryside with my characters, seeing where we need to go and letting them suggest the ways. Keeping my intuition open for possibilities is just as important as paying attention to all the details. In fact, when they work together it makes for a really interesting trip.
posted by Anne McAllister at 10:15 AM
2 Comments:
is something to be said for intuition, for... thinking not only "outside the box" but outside the whole blinkin' warehouse.
Bravo, Anne! I think it helps to have the writing equivalent of a good sense of direction before following that willow-the-wisp into the mist. ;-)
I agree, Anna. The novelist, E L Doctorow said once that writing was like driving at night with headlights. It helped if you knew you were going to Pittsburgh, as opposed to, say, Miami, but you could make the trip only seeing what the headlights illuminated. That's pretty much writing for me!
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