Balancing the Intuitive Mind
November is my favorite month. There’s something mournful, quiet and introspective about this month. This time of the year fills so many authors with a desire to hunker down and fill page after page with our deepest understanding of who we are and what moves us. At the same time, its fleeting beauty reminds me of how easy it can be as an intuitive personality to miss the present moment in the world outside of our imagination. Lately I’ve been thinking about how we, as writers, can celebrate the present and find some balance.
Grasp the Season
Have you noticed that some writers seem to latch onto certain seasons? Elin Hilderbrand is almost synonymous with summer even though her books aren’t all set in the summer. Stephen King and Kristin Hannah have written numerous books set in the winter.
You and I don’t need to set all or even most of our books in one given season. However, there’s a lot to be said for writing a book that’s set in the season in which you’re writing [the first draft]. This works well for me since I tend to write in Fall and/or Winter, both of which feature well in Gothic literature.
This won’t work for everyone, and some of our books span multiple seasons. However, writing in the season I’m experiencing helps me to stop and take in what’s all around me.
Find Yourself
The most frequent writing question I receive is, “How do you come up with a story idea?” But the second is usually some iteration of: “Do you base your characters off of people you know?” or “Do you base the main character off of yourself?”
It makes sense. Most people sense something that I also contend is true: the best characters reflect pieces of ourselves. Perhaps it’s only a fraction of an emotional response to a life-altering situation, or a similar type of memory, but we write what we understand. And we understand things that we share if only at the most basic level—the emotion it evoked.
In each character that you write, ask yourself how you relate to this character. Does he have a similarly painful past? Is he struggling to overcome a hurdle that reminds you of what you felt at a difficult point in time? Do his core values mirror your own? Does he have a similar response to situations like being in crowds or feeling pressured to meet a deadline?
Whatever it may be, find a relatable point and pour yourself into every character you write. I think you’ll find that you work through a lot of your own struggles and come to understand yourself more deeply. And your characters will jump off of the page.
Write What’s Now
If you ask most writers, including myself, how they come up with story ideas, the most prevalent answer seems to be that we write what we encounter in our own lives. It may be a news story that sparks a question in our minds, or a comment that someone makes that we chew over and unpack, or a dream or personal experience. Writers work through real questions by building stories in which all of the characters have to face that question, make choices and determine what they believe about it.
For example, I’m currently working on my second book, The Monster of Vienna. It’s about a young boy who’s a violin prodigy in Vienna during the middle of the 19th century. The story came to me when I encountered two separate things:
- Certain men including a friend’s husband who took the desire to be respected to an unhealthy level. For them it was no longer a desire, but something to be demanded and required.
- Various news articles about people who commit violent acts, in which the journalists pointed to a bad experience in the person’s youth or a bullying incident in grade school. The assumption in many of these articles/ reports is that an experience, not the perpetrator, is always to blame when someone does something wrong.
I set out to write about monstrosity—about what causes a person to do horrific things. And I gave myself a large enough cast of characters to be able to examine the issue from a number of different viewpoints. Further, I deliberately crafted a main character who, although he has disappointments and challenges in life, has no definable trauma. Sure, others have disregarded him or even teased him. His life is realistic and relatable.
And yet, whereas others develop into solid, responsible adults, he becomes a monster…why?
That’s a question that we ask more and more frequently in our modern world. And it deserves an answer.
Real-Life Details
You may have noticed that the prior three examples are still very intuitive-focused. They’re deep and introspective. When we write about the autumn season, we’re still delving into what autumn means in the life of a person. Is it our attempt to grasp and hold onto the fleeting joys of our short time on this earth? Is it about the things that we take for granted that are here one day and gone the next?
In the other two, we dive into a deeper understanding of what we believe and who we are. We speak to the heart of challenging questions and experiences—what we believe about them and what we want others to consider and understand as they wade through similar questions.
So this last one is a bit of a sensory relief from those. And it’s simple: include something that you can also do in real life. If you’re love baking, or playing rugby or foraging for mushrooms, put that in your book. At the same time, make sure to get out (or stay in) and spend at least a little time actually doing those things. It’ll bring new color and a richer tone to your writing and it’ll ground you in the real world in a way that will help you to celebrate the present.
Conclusion
We’re writers. The writing process is intrinsically inward-focused. It’s a process that suits an intuitive mind. But most of us, like other people, could still use more balance in our lives. We could benefit from things that take us out of our heads. Just a little bit. Just enough to celebrate the present so that we can relish the best in life and then take that back into our writing.
Let me know what works for you? How do you find balance in life?
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