Intuition and Creativity

I’m fortunate enough to be teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing class this semester. Last Thursday was the first day of class. I encouraged my students to pay attention to the people around them: how they spoke, acted, seemed to think, as that will help them write characters. But that led me down a bit of a tangent about how intuition works.

It’s not uncommon for many of us to think we can know, or at least guess well, what other people are thinking. I don’t think that’s all that unusual, and I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious either. I suggested to my students that our minds are big pattern recognition machines. We pay attention to a variety of verbal and non-verbal cues such as tone of voice, facial expression, body language, hand gestures, and maybe even scent — which would certainly be unconsciously registered for most of us — and filter all of those cues through our past experiences, our prejudices, and our expectations to figure out what’s really going on with the person in front of us.

I pointed out that because half of intuition is our own experiences and expectations, we need to be careful with what we infer about other people. Even if we’re reading them right, we’re still not really reading their minds, so we should never presume to know what they are really thinking. At best, we’re only seeing a little bit of them at that moment. Really getting to know what and how someone thinks takes time and honest conversation, and however often we think we’re right, I think the truth is we almost never follow up so that we can find out our real track record. As a result, most of us go through life trusting our intuition more than we should. Intuition is a valuable but very incomplete tool, so it’s a mistake to trust it exclusively.

However, what happens if we turn intuition on its head? Suppose we set it aside, momentarily, as a guide to external reality and use it instead as a way of creating characters? We could instead take that mental picture we’re building up of this other person — which is only partially correct at best — and use it as the beginning of a fictional character. Suddenly, our powers of pattern recognition feed our imagination as we use them to develop, in detail, fictional characters who have fully developed gestures, body language, tone of voice, etc. I think this way of using intuition can never go wrong, because while we may start with a real person as raw material, we don’t have to stop there. We can make our characters any way we want them to be.