I have learned a lot of writing techniques over the years that have made me a better writer. But there is a skill I have learned that is arguably more important than all the techniques. That is the skill of feel. The interesting thing about feel is that it was under my radar for a long time, and when I did learn about it, it wasn’t in regards to writing at all. I want to shed some light on this not-often talked about skill that has helped my writing so much.
The Skill of Feel
During my first horseback riding lesson as an adult, my riding coach told me that I would learn a lot of riding techniques. I would learn how to ask the horse to go forward, to stop, to steer right and left, and the list went on from there. “Technique,” she said, “is easy to teach and easy to learn. It is also far less important than developing feel. Feel,” my coach stated,” is impossible to teach and very difficult to learn.”
So What is Feel?
In the simplest definition I can manage, feel is the knowing that comes from experience, and thus cannot be shared or taught.
Feel is knowing how much pressure to put into leg, seat, and hand aids when riding a horse to get the desired result.
Feel is knowing how to stay balanced when you ride a bike.
Feel is knowing a friend or family member is under the weather before they say something.
Feel is knowing where to put scene and chapter breaks for the best pacing in a story.
These are all things that a person just knows, but they cannot adequately explain how or why. Feel is what some people call a gut feeling or intuition. It’s the knowing that comes from experience. You already have feel in most aspects of your life and yet you are probably completely unaware of it.
You Can’t Teach Feel
When my riding coach told me that learning feel was difficult, I didn’t believe her. I was a good student and I was convinced I would learn easily. During my riding lessons, my coach taught me technique and I practiced those techniques. And while I was riding, my coach would often call out: “He’s dropping his shoulder, did you feel that?” To which I would reply, “No.” And later, “He was moving so rhythmically there, did you feel that?” “Maybe?” And it continued, over and over: “Did you feel that?” And for a long time, I really had no idea what she was talking about. Until one day she asked that question and I realized I did feel something different from what I had been feeling. It was the first time I was able to answer that question with: “Yes.”
What I Was Actually Learning
It was years before it occurred to me how I learned feel without being directly taught. Each time my coach queried: “Did you feel that?” she was actually reminding me, and thus teaching me, to be aware of myself and my horse while riding. The repetition of that question turned that awareness into a habit, and the more aware I was, the more I was able to feel.
How this Applies to Writing
I learned to increase my awareness while riding my horse, but I also took the same awareness and applied it to my writing. I began to notice when my good writing times were and where I was the most productive. I learned to distinguish between something being off in the story or something being off with me. And with that awareness I was able to integrate the writing techniques that worked for me and ignore the ones that didn’t far more quickly because I knew how things felt when they were working and when they weren’t. I could also more accurately pinpoint problems in my story, even if I wasn’t sure how to fix them quite yet.
So Now What?
The good news is you’ve already developed a lot of feel. You gain feel from experience and you’ve been living for a while now. The thing is, you aren’t doing it consciously. When you exercise awareness of yourself and the things that you do, you can develop feel more quickly.
In next week’s post I am going to lay out an exercise I used to help consciously raise my own awareness, which helped me develop feel. This exercise will be possible for you to do on your own and, with practice, will help you develop your skill of feel, which you will apply to your writing.
This post is part of a series of three:
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness
