A Second Mental Skill Set for Your Writing Practice
It's about showing up, doing the work, and making sure it's done right.
Last week, I wrote about three fundamental mental attributes you should cultivate if you want to get a steady writing practice started: curiosity, humility, and autonomy. I’m borrowing them from David Robson’s The Intelligence Trap, and he borrowed them from the Intellectual Virtues Academy, a private school in California that trains its students in nine “master virtues” for thinking well.
The virtues they teach are great mental tools in general, but I’m interested in how they can be particularly useful as you’re trying to write. With that in mind, I’m going to look at the next batch of three skills: attentiveness, carefulness, and thoroughness.
The obvious aspect of attentiveness for me to focus on would be “attention to detail,” but I’m going to hold off on that right now. Instead, I want to talk about “showing up” for your writing practice as a form of paying attention. It’s about making time to write, and then using that time to write, rather than allow yourself to put off the writing by doing something else.
I’m not saying you need to be moving a pen across paper, or tapping away at your keyboard, the whole time; thinking about what you’re writing, in the time you’ve set aside for writing, is as much a part of writing as the physical act. I am, however, saying that when you’ve carved out time in your life to write, you should try not to spend that time thinking about what you want for lunch, or the bills that need to be paid, or other things which have little to do with your writing. (You need to think about those things, of course, and you have the rest of your day to do it.)
In that sense, attentiveness is about honoring a commitment you made to yourself to pursue the stories you want to share with the world. It’s also about following through on your curiosity, which drove you to ask certain questions. You exercise your attentiveness by sitting with those questions, considering them fully, and pursuing the answers wholeheartedly so you can answer them through your writing.
(To repeat a point I made last week, although the “writing as answering questions” model most obviously fits nonfiction, it can apply to any type of writing—fiction, drama, poetry, whatever. You could be asking about something real, something hypothetical, or something perceived; the answers might be found in history or in your imagination.)
With the kind of attention you’re paying to these questions, you want to come up with the right answers, and that’s where carefulness kicks in, and where attention to detail starts to matter. And in the same way that attentiveness was a fulfillment of your curiosity, your carefulness will be a fulfillment of your humility, that initial recognition that you don’t know everything about these questions at the beginning, that you’ll have to work for the answers.
You’re not going to stumble around mentally, grabbing at the first answer you find and calling it a day. You’re going to look that answer over. Does it hold up to scrutiny? Does it seem a bit obvious? What happens if you start asking followup questions based on the premises it offers you? These questions matter to you, so, like I said, you want to make sure you get the answers right, and you’re willing to put in the time and the effort to make sure that happens.
So now we come to thoroughness, where attention to detail really kicks into gear, but you’ve probably already guessed that I’m also going to talk about it as a fulfillment of your pursuit of creative autonomy, which was about “thinking for yourself” rather than settling for somebody else’s answers to your questions. “You want answers to your questions, [but] you recognize you don’t have the answers,” I wrote last week, “so now you realize that you have to find those answers.”
Once you make that decision to do the work of finding the answers, the decisions that come from your sense of attentiveness and carefulness follow. You make the commitment to show up for the work, and you make the commitment to do it right, and now here you are, making the commitment to see it through—to keep at it until you get answers that don’t merely gratify you, but truly satisfy the questions you’ve raised.
This is the big challenge, isn’t it? It’s easy to want to be a writer, and a lot harder to maintain a consistent writing practice, one that rewards you with insights that are meaningful and true. (Again, “true” isn’t just about nonfiction here.) I could write an entire book just on how to cultivate “attentiveness,” except that plenty of people have beaten me to it—although, if you poke around in this newsletter’s archives, you might find one or two helpful tips! I hope so, anyway.
In the next newsletter, I’m going to take a look at the final three “master virtues” from the IVA set list, and how they can help you over the long haul.
(Meanwhile, for my American readers who are eligible to vote: are you registered to vote? If so, has early voting begun in your state, and have you voted or made plans to vote early? If not, have you gotten hold of your absentee ballot, or put in your request for that ballot? If not, are you planning to vote on Election Day? I probably don’t need to tell you at this point how much this election matters, and how important your vote is. Early voting in New York starts on October 24, and I’m planning on masking up and walking the five blocks to cast my ballot that afternoon. If you haven’t voted yet or don’t have a firm plan for how you’re going to vote, please make those plans as soon as possible, and follow through on them.)