Dan Nielsen’s recent column in this paper addressed to individuals who want to begin writing their first novel reminded me of a basic truth about writing I learned a long time ago when I accepted an invitation from my educational psychologist friend to accompany him to a conference on cognitive style.
What I learned at that conference has stayed with me all these years. At the time it ran counter to how I, as a young English instructor, should teach my students how to write in their required freshman composition course. I was to use, or perhaps better said inflict upon them, a tome that insisted on the then-accepted wisdom that one must begin by coming up with a thesis statement leading to an outline that would shape the writing.
Sounds sensible.
But what I learned at that conference was that one size doesn’t fit all. Specifically, “cognitive style” is as the name suggests a description of how we prefer to solve problems, rather than how well. That is a major difference. I learned that cognitive style, the how of problem solving, can be divided into two broad categories, those who are systematic and those who are intuitive.
Here’s how those categories work, again the preferred approach rather than the quality of the effort. When confronted with a problem, the systematic person will plan a step-by-step approach that will lead to a solution. The intuitive person will just start trying things. All other things, such as native intelligence, being equal, both styles can and do, get good results.
I recall the screening tests we took to determine for ourselves which style we preferred. One test was a word jumble as appears regularly in newspapers where the chore is to unscramble mixed up letters to find the word they spell. A systematic person will likely go though the letters one-by-one as starts to a word while an intuitive person will somehow unscramble letters in no particular order.
Another test used the familiar find-your-way-through-a-maze kind of puzzle. A systematic person will look ahead to possible routes to avoid dead ends. An intuitive person, on the other hand, will bump into walls, recalibrate and continue. Both methods will work although the systematic person probably has an edge for this kind of task while it is likely that the intuitive person will have the advantage in speed in the word scramble test.
Returning to our potential novelist, these style categories shape how we prefer to write, as they do any problem-solving task.
It should also be clear that the textbook I was told to use insisted on a systematic approach for my students even if that was not their preferred style.
But I never, throughout my own long career ever approached a writing task that way even though, if so tasked I can produce lovely outlines. The only writing outline I ever actually produced was the one that was required of me to gain approval of my doctoral dissertation thesis. On the other hand, I recall being in the middle of writing one of my novels when a character I hadn’t thought of jumped into a scene and continued thereafter to participate in my emerging plot.
A novel writing friend once shared his approach, which involved planning not only plot and characterization but imagery patterns. Readers, however, cannot tell how differently we approach writing novels.
So, my short answer to the question of how to start writing that novel is either come up with a plan or follow Hemingway, as Nielsen reminds us. and just write “one true sentence” and see where it goes.