In the novel I’m writing, fire images recur ad nauseum.  Boats burn, yards burn, dogs leap through flame, etc.  The repetition eventually caught my attention, and my rational mind recoiled.  Why so much fire?  This is nonsense, man, stop it!

I made a conscious effort to snuff the flames, despite an urge to incinerate things in almost every chapter.  Thousands of words later, I caught myself writing a scene in which an entire prairie burns.  Then it hit me: fire was the solution to motivation problems my protagonist had been struggling with since the novel’s inception.  Intuition was trying to clue me in, but my rational mind, with its insistence on reason, wouldn’t listen.

How can intuition be accessed and employed in writing?  What role does it play in the writing process?  I asked a poet, a nonfiction author and a novelist how they harness their intuitive power.  Here’s a summation of what they said:

• Warm up.  Read something before you write, to create an aura of intuition and give yourself an opening into an idea or feeling.  Take a word, phrase or mood and transfer it to the first moments of writing.  Something emerges onto the page intuitively, in the context of your project, and then you can develop it.

• Listen.  Open up to your inner voice and hear what it’s saying.  It might be the voice of a character, or a wiser version of yourself.  Don’t force it, just wait for an idea, snip of dialogue, image, etc. that grabs you.  If it rings true, use it.

• Pay attention.  Be aware of urges and hunches while you write.  If you feel a pull in some direction, go that way.  When you’re having trouble making a decision in your piece, there’s usually an intuitive wisdom that knows what to do.  If you pay attention, the decision’s already made.

• Play.  Intuition comes through most easily when you’re having fun.  Stress and worry shut it down.  If one chapter seems more fun than another, work on that one, even if your rational side doesn’t like the sequence.  You have to stay loose to open the door.

• Interpret.  It’s not always obvious what to do with intuitive insights.  Sometimes you have to zoom back and ask yourself how they fit into the big picture.  What do they mean?  How can they contribute?  Allow intuition to come through first, then let lefty figure out what to do with it.

Intuition is the spark that ignites great writing, but like the smell of distant smoke it’s easy to ignore and rationalize away.  In most of us, the rational mind is well developed, while intuition is largely suppressed.  But where’s the logic in that?  If both are needed to produce our best work, doesn’t it stand to reason that we should develop intuition?

Next time, with help from Shakti Gawain’s excellent book, Developing Intuition, I’ll outline some steps you can take to get rational and light a flame under yours.

A big challenge for many fiction writers is to create characters who act on their desires rather than just thinking about them--characters who move intentionally toward change.  Clearly identifying a character's motivation for action is challenging, too--especially when you want the action to both arise from and embody the motivation.  Here's a fun, versatile exercise you can use to explore the relationship between motivation and action.

To start, go through your house--junk drawers, closets, garage, whatever--and look for objects that catch your interest.  Quirky, suggestive objects with lots of associations tend to work best.  Maybe you find a grubby baby booty, or an old family photo, or a brand new pair of ski goggles, still in the box.  Once you have something you like, sit down and free write for ten minutes about why your character stole that object.  Write in first-person, from the point of view of the character.  You'll be surprised by what you discover, and how relevant it is to your story.  Once you determine your character's motivation for stealing the object, go on to explore other aspects of the situation.  Who did she steal it from?  Where?  How?  What happened afterwards?  What did she do with the object?  Who is she confessing to?  What does her confession reveal? 

This exercise is great for deepening existing characters and creating new ones, revealing hidden motivations and desires, developing new story lines and subplots, etc.  If it works for you, try it on a larger scale.  Dream big.  What if your character stole a baby?  A family history?  A ski resort?  The motivations behind theft are rich and complex, and not always criminal; they can reveal a lot about who your characters are, how they're motivated in your story, and how they're likely to change by the time the plot wraps up.  

If change is on your mind but stolen objects don't strike your interest, try an open free write from this month's photo prompt and see if it sparks some ideas.

*exercise adapted from Now Write!, edited by Sherry Ellis