I just realized it's been over a month since my last post that was remotely writing related. There are reasons for that (like having been in England) but sheesh! Looking at my recent blog you'd never know I r a ritr.

It just so happens that I'm reading a nonfiction book now that I didn't think was remotely research. It's called How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. My Dad gave me this book recently (he gave it to all his kids and probably random strangers on the street. He really liked it. For good reason).

Lehrer is (basically) talking about the human brain, and how it works to make decisions. He uses modern neurobiology and occasionally psychology to map out this theory he has that we rely heavily on our emotions to decide. That Plato (and subsequent years and years of Western philosophy) was totally off the mark by suggesting that the rational brain needs to control the emotional/animal brain. And, most importantly, that we should be glad for our emotions, for our "gut reactions," and for those intuitive warnings we get from our brains but can't quite understand logically. The animal brain, after all, has been evolving for millions of years, while the so-called rational brain is relatively new from an evolutionary standpoint, and perhaps has not had the benefit of so much time to hone its abilities. (The divide between rational and emotional brain is totally false, too, which I know and Lehrer knows, but it's a good metaphor for these purposes. And anyway, Plato started it - as he started SO MANY things).

I'm fascinated by my brain, and my imagination, and how it all works to help me do all the things it takes to eventually create a novel. I didn't think this book would inform my creativity as much as it already has, and I'm only about a hundred pages in.

One of the experiments Lehrer uses spoke directly to one of the most mysterious things I've noticed when it comes to writing a novel.

The experiment:

Four stacks of cards are put in front of the subject. Each card has a direction, like in Monopoly, such as "lose $50" or "gain $25." Two of the decks have more negative cards and the other two have more positive cards. The subject is given $2000 and told to begin drawing cards, and play to get the most money at the end that they can.

After about 50 draws, the subject usually knows which decks they prefer to draw from, and after about 80 draws, they can explain why.

But after only 10 draws the subjects hands begin to sweat and other subtle emotional indicators every time they read for one of the negative piles. They're nervous.

In other words, after a mere 10 draws they feel something is "wrong" with those two decks, and it takes until 50 before they consciously realize it, and then again until 80 before their rational brain can explain why.

And subjects with brain damage resulting in the inability to feel emotions never figure out the difference in the decks at all!

What does this have to do with writing?

Last Wednesday, I had to write a short story for merry_fates. I started three different stories before I began the one that I eventually finished. And each time, after a paragraph, or a sentence, or in the last case, 600 words, I felt like something was wrong. I didn't know what. There were no obvious flaws. They simply weren't working. I could feel it. So I scrapped and began again.

This happens when writing novels even more. It's this sick feeling in my stomach that says, you're doing something wrong. There are a lot of ways to work with this, and usually they revolve around going back and trying to find a way for my rational brain to catch up with my emotional brain. Not only is it ok for me to listen to that intuition telling me to follow a certain character arc, or to stop immediately with that plot point that clearly isn't right - I HAVE to listen if I want to find the right story and the right path of my novel.

But here's the real lesson: it takes practice. My emotional brain didn't evolve to know how to feel out the way to the perfect novel. If that were the case, anybody could do it. I had to write novels over and over again, and I had to write 75 short stories in the past 18 months in order to set up patterns for my emotions to LEARN FROM.

It's like this. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter largely responsible for communicating what we think of a emotions, causes sea-sickness. It's because dopamine "expects" hard ground. So when suddenly it's confronted with tossing seas underfoot, it freaks out. Eventually, it gets used to the motions and learns to "expect" it, which is why sea-sickness is usually temporary.

When I wrote my first novel, my dopamine didn't know what I was doing. When I wrote my second novel, it still didn't know much. By my third, there was a pattern being established. With my fourth, and the rewrite of my third, my dopamine was learning (and so was my rational brain, but in a different way). By my fifth I was getting better, and by my sixth I could see all the critiques I was getting as I got them. I suspected what was wrong when I was done. I occasionally knew badness as it was happening, even. My sixth is the one that finally landed me some professional success.

And now, as I try to write my seventh, I am occasionally slammed to a halt by that intuition that knows, even when I don't, why something is wrong. I can logically say "but this will lead here, and that will lead there, and it will be good." But my emotions tell me "yes, that's true, but if you do that, it won't be GREAT. If you want it great, keep looking."

Creative writing is a balance. Emotion and reason. If it's all one or the other, it will fail. With every new effort, there is new learning. That's how you go from apprentice to journeyman to master.

By making mistakes so that your dopamine can learn from them.