Follow your instincts!

How intuition can be a powerful tool for writers

I heard the poet and BBC radio 4 Word of Mouth presenter, Michael Rosen, interviewing Hilary Mantel the other day. It’s a fascinating programme and I would highly recommend listening to it. Mantel talked a lot about the craft of writing, and what interested me was how much emphasis she put on instinct as a writing tool. Here is her description, taken from around the middle of the broadcast, of the writing process:

I think that so much of what I do with language is just instinctive. You see I don't really think of myself as creating the language because language pre exists. I just have to go where it is. I have to find it and it has to find me and it's as much about listening as it is about being active. You have an inner voice where the perfect novel is kept, the perfect sentence is kept and your task is to mediate that to the world outside and that's the writer’s daily business but of course you don't think of it like that. You just type fast and because you're accustomed, because you've been doing this for years and years, it's like starting a song: the rhythm won't falter, the internal logic of the prose won't let you down. In the same way I think with a long book you sometimes have to forget about structure and trust that it's doing itself and it is but there's such a fine balance between exerting absolute control and simply letting go so the thing can happen.

I’m so relieved to find that a twice Booker prize winner advises us to ‘forget about structure.’ Hooray! So my ‘pantsing’ rather than ‘planning’ is deemed to be okay.

Elsewhere in the broadcast, Mantel talks about her subconscious communicating to the reader’s subconscious and I think that’s a beautiful way of describing the alchemy that happens when writers write and readers read. There is another blog article about this here.

 Intuition, instinct and the subconscious have a huge part to play in the writing process – and is often when we least expect it that ideas come.