A Basic Mental Skill Set for Your Writing Practice

Stories—all kinds of stories—start with questions, and knowing you don't know all the answers yet.

I forget how exactly it is that I came to read David Robson’s The Intelligence Trap, an excellent book on, as the subtitle says, “why smart people make dumb mistakes,” but I found it very interesting. One particularly useful section discussed a private school in California called the Intellectual Virtues Academy, which tries to ground its students in nine “master virtues” intended to foster critical thinking.

I felt that these “virtues” might prove useful to anyone who’s trying to maintain a regular writing practice, particularly someone who’s actively seeking to write something that they can go on to share with others—whether they’re planning to write fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry… anything, really. The IVA breaks their list of nine mental attributes down into three sets of three, so this newsletter will tackle the first and most fundamental batch: curiosity, humility, and autonomy.

Why start with curiosity? For me, it’s because stories—again, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about fiction, nonfiction, a play, a poem—answer questions. They answer questions we put to ourselves, and questions that we put to the world. We want to understand why something happened the way it did, the conditions and processes that define our existence. We want to understand why people behave the way they do, and what they might do under different circumstances. We want to know if someone else can recognize the way we experience the world around us, not just with our physical senses but with our emotions. And we want to know these things about ourselves.

So, first and foremost, we need to ask questions. We need to love asking questions, and learning the answers. You’ve probably heard the clichéd advice to “write what you know,” but maybe we should change that to “write what you’ve learned.” I’ve seen at least one counter-argument along the lines of “write what you don’t know, and force yourself to find out,” and that sounds about right to me.

That leads us to intellectual humility, and the need to stop thinking you already know the answers to the questions that are relevant to whatever story you’ve got in mind. Maybe you do—but maybe you don’t. Asking the question, and taking it seriously enough to really review the evidence, may enable you to see something you thought you understood in a new light, and the insight will lead you to a story you find even more compelling. Instead of resting on your laurels, push yourself in a new direction, expose yourself to new opportunities and possibilities.

You don’t know everything. I suppose it’s possible that you know more than most people, perhaps more than anybody else in the world, about a given topic—especially if we’re talking about your thoughts and feelings and experiences—but I can guarantee that your knowledge is not total and comprehensive, not even about yourself. You can always find new avenues of exploration, and it starts by admitting it would do you good to go looking for them.

Finally, there’s intellectual autonomy—a fancy way to describe “thinking for yourself.” Curiosity and humility combine to spark that autonomy: You want answers to your questions, you recognize you don’t have the answers, so now you realize that you have to find those answers and, ideally, you rise to the challenge. You take the time to challenge your assumptions, examine the evidence, consider it carefully, and lay out your conclusions.

I know I’ve laid that out in a way that sounds exclusively fact-based, but the basic principle works just as well for writing fiction. When it’s done right, fiction shows us emotionally realistic models of people reacting to various circumstances, sometimes alone but usually interacting with other emotionally realistic models. If that sounds dry, let’s put it another way: How would someone react if they had just arrived in a foreign city and their luggage was stolen? How would a boy’s parents react if they learned he had been suspended from school? What would the employees at a small company do if their boss announced one day that she’d sold the business to someone else and then walked away? Good stories start with questions like these, and emotionally realistic characters make for better stories, because they deal with those questions in more realistic ways. Not necessarily the way the person writing the story would deal with them, but the way a person like that character would.

To make those stories happen, you need to act on your curiosity, humility, and autonomy. In order to do that, you need to commit to your writing practice, and you need to follow through on that commitment. I’m not saying you have to become a perfectly disciplined master at it right away. Chances are, you won’t. You’ll miss a day somewhere along the line. When that happens, hang on to the questions you’re trying to answer. Find time to deal with them again, when you can.

What if you haven’t settled on the questions you want to answer with your writing? Does that mean you can’t start writing until you come up with a question? Of course not. It just means that you’ll have to lean hard into your curiosity, trying out different questions and seeing where your attempts to answer them lead. You’ll probably hit a few dead ends that way, stories that don’t fully pan out, but even in those cases you’ll hopefully learn something that will make it easier for you to land upon the right question the next time, or the time after that.

In the next newsletter, I’ll talk about the next skill set, the one that can help you in the followthrough phase, and maybe make it a little easier to write rather than not writing.