Young Writers Society

Back again with more questions

Do you write by logic or intuition?

Or a combination of both?

Which has been more of a success for you?

I don't entirely understand what you're trying to ask here, but I'll do my best to answer the question, anyway.

Writing is a combination of logic, intuition, and simply letting your inner artist take over. Logic, because you need to know your grammar. You need to know how to structure sentences, and how to spell and punctuate, and what is and isn't okay. You need a basic understanding (at least) of human nature, and you need to be able to research certain topics.

Intuition is more about knowing what the reader will like, in part, and knowing how your characters will react to certain situations, etc. You have to break away from your logic and let things flow. Grammar rules don't all need to be kept, and you have to sacrifice certain logical procedures for the sake of voice or flow.

And then art comes in, and that's where the beauty of a work lies. And that, you can't even really explain.

Writing isn't logic or intuition or art, it's a combination of the three. Some people might use more than the others, but hey. If you can't have all of them, you've got a lousy piece of writing.

What Isha said. Writing is a complex thought process that requires both skill sets. Intuition can help you envision a scene in your mind, while logic makes you take a step back and see if what you're envisioning makes sense (say, should this character have these awesome fighting skills in this action sequence? Or do these characters really fall in love at first sight?)

Generally I create with intuition and I plot with logic.

So, when creating characters, instead of following the logical approach of asking what colour hair, eyes, skin they have, where they're from, yada yada, I'll ask a few really big questions like.... what they believe the worst sin to be or how they justify their strongest prejudice. Then I have at least an idea of what drives them and how the characters would conflict. The rest I follow intuition on what their favourite things are and what kind of dialect they have, e.c.t.

When I create a world I just go with intuition and fill it with all the things I want it to have. I'll decide some rough ideas like 'this country will be based on wood, and this one on water' so that I at least have a feeling of where their differences lie and what the climate might be like if I had to decide later, and all that stuff.

When it comes to plotting though I tend to use logic to tie the pieces together. I quite like novels that have fewer characters and settings.

There could have a posh butler in a castle, and then down the road have a rugged barman, and that's two characters who are there to serve their purpose. I don't care about either of them. I care about the butler who's messes up his hair and sneaks out on his night off to moonlight as a pub down the road. He may just be a background character but now he's a whole lot cooler, and there's only one of him to keep track of.

In the same way, a father could sit in his sons empty bedroom fretting over whether he'll be alright at his first sleepover, and hear a noise. The father then runs out, sneaks around, chases a burglar into the kitchen and accidentally kills him. Or you could have the burglar flee across the hallway and into the sons bedroom. You have one less room, and a massive choice of possible psychological outcomes to play with.

But of course those intricate plots require a lot of thought to sew them together as seamlessly as I like, and these need brain power and logic. If I just go by intuition then it usually leads to some not-so-need stitching and a lot of loose ends to fix later.

Auto correction on my phone is not helping. Adding new words lol. I've changed it now.

Some good points here. First of all I did miss out art, I think that is quite crucial and without it writing is like flowers with no fragrance. Do you thing it all depends on the genre we have chosen? Some are entirely logic based. Maybe persuasive writing needs no art but precisivness, therefore logic.

In a nutshell, does this all mean, planning is necessary no matter what kind of writing we write? Even if writing about intimate ife experienced?

I definitely do not think persuasive writing is only about logic. Think about the persuasive writing you see every single day: the ads on your screen. Right now I'm seeing two ads: one for some law book, and the other for GoToMeeting. The law book ad quotes an attorney saying that it's an invaluable resource...a more logical approach. Yet it also has a big logo for Thomson Reuters, as if to say "This is a reliable company. You trust us, so you should buy this book."

The Go-To-Meeting ad is more emotion-based. It says little about the product except that I can try it NOW for FREE. This is attempting to use human impulsiveness (who doesn't like free things now) to hook me into using their service.

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples/examples-of-ethos-logos-and-pathos.html Here's a definition and examples of ethos, logos, and pathos, the basis of most persuasive arguments. With some arguments, logic may more dominant, while in others, emotional appeals (which you need intuition to understand) make more sense.

In a nutshell, does this all mean, planning is necessary no matter what kind of writing we write? Even if writing about intimate ife experienced?

Yes, I'd say so. When you're writing about your life, it's a good idea to consider your audience. What do they want to know, and what do they need to know to learn that? Say you had to write about what you did last week. What you write to your close friend is going to be very different from what you tell your boss, which will be different from what you tell your doctor. Think about what the point of the story is, and that will help you frame it properly and avoid excess details.

Persuasive writing is extremely intuition based.

Think about it. Persuasion involves knowing what the other person wants to hear. This means being able to intuit what's important to them. You can base some of this on logic, but a lot of it is imagining yourself as another person. Advertisers sometimes fully immerse themselves in their target audience to try and figure out what's going on.

A truly brilliant advertiser gets insights that seemingly come out of nowhere. Some of this can be logically connecting things together, but a lot of it is simply a sense of what the audience wants.

Then, on top of that, advertisers have to be able to sell to multiple audiences: they have to sell to their supervisors, the company buying the campaign, and finally the audience buying the company's product. Some of this is logic. A lot of this, especially picking up on body language cues for in-person selling, is intuition.

Good persuasive writing isn't a formula. You can try to make it a formula, but that is when the persuasion starts to fail. People see through formulas very quickly. This is where you have to use intuition, because if you don't have some innate sense to know what will work to reach that person, how to structure the argument, and what information to even give.

Yes, it takes an extreme amount of logic to persuade, but this is mostly to iron out counterarguments. You have to come up with what people will say as reasons not to sign. This is in pure writing, though. When you're dealing with creative works themselves, you have to come up with what will convince the audience that this is right so completely they don't have time to come up with counterarguments.

Honestly, logic is easy. Logic is a case of going "we're in an economic recession so we should emphasize low price" and "we're marketing to pet owners so we should show pets being happy and safe".

Intuition is hard. Intuition is thinking "let's have a girl counting petals of a daisy ending in a nuclear blast, then have a voice over of our opponent's campaign speech", or "an ad replicating 1984 would be perfect to sell a computer". Both of those ads, btw, completely revolutionized advertising. The first ad was so effective, it made attack ads the norm in political campaigns. The second launched a whole company and the brand associated with it.

You can't make these extremely persuasive ads with pure logic. You can only make them with intuition.