I did laugh when Michael Caine recently agreed in a radio interview that he's "an instinctive actor", and promptly went into a HIGHLY technical description of how if you're talking to another actor in a scene, you should look into their left eye with your right eye, which gives you the perfect angle for the camera to pick up your expression, without it appearing that you're looking at the camera at all. No other combination of gazes will do... Oh, and don't blink, not ever, unless you want to show weakness... Instinctive? I don't think so. Caine's art, it seems to me, is the sort which conceals art, which is perhaps what makes the "instinctive" tag seem right even though he puts enormous thought and technical control into what he does.
It's a funny old business this, isn't it: the assumption is that there's a binary opposition of conscious technical understanding, versus instinctive creativity; actors talk about having technique "to fall back on", and "technical" is so often used as a synonym for dry and dehumanised. And then on a WriteWords thread crime writer Helen Black talked in detail about how she builds the opening of her novels, and then said,
I've never done this consciously, however. But that's something I often notice here on WriteWords. Someone far more knowledgeable than me will explain in a writerly way why certain things in writing work well. These things often, it transpires, even have a proper name. And I often sit here thinking, 'I do that', though I couldn't tell you how or why I do it.
Helen is a writer who wrote a novel for fun and got it published, and she's worked out her very demanding genre from first principles: she's followed her own instinctive decisions about "Like this? No, like that. And a bit of The Other. Only the other way round..." to the point where she has clear principles of storytelling without ever having been near a course or a textbook. Is she very technical, or very intuitive? The answer is, of course, is that she's turned her intuition into technique, even if she has no technical terms.
There are so many ways to discuss the same piece of writing. Helen talks about how she introduces her detective with a domestic scene so we get a sense of her as a character before the plot kicks off. I can say that in the novel I'm reporting on the structure means that the jeopardy doesn't increase, or I can say the story fizzles out. A critic discusses how Joyce roots his single day in Dublin in the archetypes of Greek Myth, and Simon Armitage talks about "giving a poem a thump to see if it rings true". "What do you mean by a slack sentence, a bland plot, really rich writing," asks the exasperated beginner? What do we mean by "voice", come to that, or "structure"? Such metaphors are writerly shorthand for how grammar, vocabulary and storytelling are working. Like intuitive writing, intuitive analysis is quick: none of us, for now, need to get down to the chromosomal level because our intuitive understandings are talking to each other. One marker of a promising student is that our metaphors make sense to them even when they've never met them before. And invariably their writerly/readerly intuitions, if not yet their technical awareness, are also operating well already: that's what makes them promising. But it's my teacher's mind, not my writer's mind, which could explain what we all mean to the rest of the class. And it's also why some terrific writers can't teach for toffee.
And it's as a teacher that I can reverse the polarity, unpicking a subordinate adverbial clause of purpose to find out why it sings. I do it not just because it amuses me (and others, to judge by the stats) nor because I don't think you can write well without being able to label the parts of speech, nor because technical understanding is handy when you need to sort out a sentence which your intuition calls clunky, or change novel genre or poetic form. I believe - no, I know - that talking technically (which probably means with proper names) about intuitive perceptions (as I was doing here) opens your ears and mind - your intuition - to the absolute molecular level of writing: how - really how - words work on each other and us, how stories are told.
