The 3rd Mental Skill Set for Your Writing Practice
Open-mindedness, courage, and tenacity for the long haul.
About a month ago, I started talking about a series of “master virtues” that I’d gleaned from my reading of David Robson’s The Intelligence Trap, nine intellectual traits that could foster critical thinking but which I believed were also essential components of a successful approach to your writing practice. I talked about curiosity, humility, and autonomy, and then a week later I took a look at attentiveness, carefulness, and thoroughness, and then I got caught up in the election and some other stuff, and I didn’t pull it together to share my thoughts on open-mindedness, courage, and tenacity.
Well, I’m back now!
In the same way that I suggested that attentiveness was about following through on your curiosity—“sitting with [your] questions, considering them fully, and pursuing the answers wholeheartedly so you can answer them through your writing”—I want to suggest that open-mindedness is a way to honor the commitment of attentiveness. It goes back to the notion that attentiveness is about being fully present to what comes up in the investigations your curiosity provokes. You need to acknowledge that, while you might have some thoughts about what those answers will be, you don’t really know yet—you need to agree to be open-minded about where your questions will lead you, and to honestly examine the answers that seem counterintuitive or unsettling or just plain wrong somehow. Maybe, if you look at those answers carefully, from every angle, you will come to recognize how and why they don’t actually fit the question… but maybe they do, and now the challenge is: what will you make of that?
It takes courage to embark on an enterprise knowing full well that your assumptions might turn out to be wrong, that you might in some way have to revise your opinions, your beliefs, your entire way of life. Or that you might come up with what you think is a stunning answer, only to find, once you present it to the world, that it’s easily taken apart or that people don’t even find it interesting enough to refute. Or that you might not even be able, at this moment, to arrive at a satisfactory answer, that you’re still as lost and uncertain as when you started out.
A good dose of humility will prepare you for those moments, because you’ll be working as consistently as possible from the premise that you can be wrong, that the whole point of doing the work is to find out where you have been wrong, and making yourself right. That humility leads to carefulness in your writing, testing what you’ve written to verify that it’s the clearest and most accurate rendering of the story you have to share with the world. And you’re putting in that careful work because you have the courage to reach that stage of sharing, no matter what the outcome.
And that courage gives you the tenacity to keep at your writing practice—to keep writing until you do figure out how to tell the story you want to tell, and to keep looking for ways to share that story even if it initially falls on deaf ears. You exercised the creative autonomy to pursue the answers to your questions, refusing to settle for easy, established truths, and you saw that pursuit through with thoroughness, “until you got answers that don’t merely gratify you,” as I wrote before, “but truly satisfy the questions you raised.”
Now autonomy (or let’s call it “independence”) and thoroughness need to team up so that, when you find those answers, you hold on to them—you flesh them out and, when and where it matters, you rearrange your life to make space for those answers to flourish, to reach their fullest potential, whatever that is. For some of you, that tenacity may lead to publishing success and literary renown; for most of us, it might simply mean a consistent recognition of what matters most to us, the values and ways of living that we hold most dear, and not just a recognition but a decreasing willingness to compromise.
I can’t tell you how much that might change your life—the only way you’ll really be able to learn is to get started. It’s not always fun, and it’s not always immediately rewarding, but it is, ultimately, what you’re willing to make of it.