A famous businessman got some unkind attention lately when, during an interview, he claimed he never practiced introspection. He said introspection is a silly modern affectation, invented only in the 1910s in Prague. (Hold this alleged factoid in your brain, we’ll come back to it.) Before that, nobody got curious about their own minds. When pressed, he said that he didn’t believe anybody practiced introspection, really. After all, what kind of weird goober thinks about their thoughts?

Well, I reckon, Socrates for one. (Dating from a bit longer ago than 1910.) But also many other great artists and teachers throughout time, have thought about their own minds, including Marcus Aurelius, St Paul, Erasmus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Ignatius de Loyola, a whole pack of anxious Puritans, Ben Franklin, Ray Bradbury, and, it is to be hoped, us. If we are writers, thinking about thinking is almost the bedrock of what we do.

This is because writing, at its base, is two things: it’s articulation of a thought, and it’s the communication of that thought to another person. Many writers have the experience of not really knowing what they think about something until they try to write it. Trying to clearly articulate an idea forces us to examine the idea itself. We may discover while we’re writing that what we thought we knew isn’t as convincing as it seemed, or what we assumed was decent evidence for something is actually self-contradictory. Or we may discover we don’t remember an event as clearly as we thought, or—and this is the one that happens to me quite a lot—we discover the plot point we confidently expected our characters to stay within doesn’t make much sense. Why would the characters behave that way? Only by writing the scene incorrectly do I realize that I don’t actually know the answer.

This is one of the hidden superpowers of writing. Cognition—thinking about stuff—is “expensive”, metabolically speaking. It takes a lot of calories, and a lot of effort. Our brains are built to try to cut corners wherever possible, and so we often don’t think through the implications of our assumptions. Writing is a powerful way to force ourselves to engage in purposeful, deliberate cognition, articulating and testing our ideas.

This isn’t just about philosophy or personal problems. It has application in the nitty-gritty of writing, too. For instance, I tend to have a difficult time writing descriptions that pop as brightly as I want. When I tried to figure out why, it took some careful cognition to realize it’s because I was writing a lot of generic descriptions. I’d write bread instead of marbled rye or bird instead of grackle. Forcing your mind to get specific about the scene in your head requires paying attention to the scene in your head—thinking about your thoughts.

I find this works for most parts of my writing that I want to improve. Sometimes the problem is just that I haven’t practiced enough. Other times, though, the problem is that I haven’t really used the expensive cognition to diagnose the real problem. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s very difficult to get there.

So, perhaps I’ve convinced you. Introspection is useful for writers. Let’s introspect! How does one actually do that?

First, get a notebook or other place to write stuff down. Remember what I said about cognition being expensive? We’re not going to make our brains reinvent the wheel with every problem. Instead, we’re going to invent a rubric: P.I.N.K. It’s easiest if we don’t have to remember the rubric, either. We’re just going to write it on the first page of our notebook to refer back to later. Here is our rubric:

1. Problem: write down, as clearly as possible, the problem. For instance, for my problem above, I’d write “I’m getting feedback that my descriptions are too thin.”
2. Introspect: write down your thoughts about the problem. This is a difficult thing if you haven’t practiced, but as much as you can just type or handwrite your thoughts directly on the page, stream-of-consciousness style. Do not correct your spelling or grammar. Do not edit yourself to sound nicer or more mature. (You can burn this later.) Fill as many pages as you need to, even if some of the space is taken up with “and those guys never do appreciate my genius, and I don’t even like descriptions”. Just get it all out.
3. Notice: when you find yourself running out of thoughts about the problem, pause. (How to you know when you’re out of problem-thoughts? When your stream-of-consciousness switches to another problem and/or to dinner.) Think back through what you’ve written. Often you’ll have figured out what’s causing the problem. For instance, in my own case, part of the cause was that I tend to get bored with descriptions in books, so I don’t practice them enough in my own writing. Also, I haven’t paid attention to the ones where I didn’t get bored, so I couldn’t analyze what makes them more to my taste than others.
4. Knock it out: this is the slightly try-hard way of saying take action. (I was trying to make a mnemonic, okay?) You’ve stated the problem, introspected with yourself about it, and noticed some potential causes. The causes usually imply their own solutions. For me, the actions I needed to take included reading more books where I enjoyed the descriptions and paying attention to why, and then simply practicing. Writing is a practice, not a performance. It was silly for me to expect to get better without working on it regularly.

This method of introspection works with things other than writing, of course. As writers we sometimes get a little precious about our craft, and we tend to think methods that work in other settings probably won’t help us. But we are making art with our brains and emotions, and brains and emotions are notoriously difficult to wrangle. We need all the help we can get, so let’s not be too proud to use what works. As for that famous businessman, I feel a bit sad for him.

How about you? Do you think my slightly silly P.I.N.K. method of thinking about thinking has application for writers? Do you use some other method to tackle sticky spots in your writing that you’d like to level-up? Let us know in the comments, so we can all learn from each other.