writing as an autodidact.

why taking control of your learning is good for your writing.

Everyone who calls themselves a writer, every pen-wielding, tea-drinking, melancholy scribbler, is trying to be better at the craft. They’re searching all the dark nooks and crannies of the web, seeking out little bits of wisdom from other people’s heads, hoping they can, by mental osmosis, acquire the very same wisdom. If I can just find the right advice, from the right experts, and make it my own knowledge, then, and only then, can I be good.

This is something of a hangover from our days in school. Back then, we had formed the impression that knowledge is something we get filled up with, as though we were an empty vessel just waiting for liquid. Teacher tells us the answer and if we can manage to remember it, and repeat it, we become the same expert they were.

This was a mistaken way to see things then, and is still a mistaken way to see things now. Learning is not something that comes from outside, but from within.

advice.

When I wrote my first novel, I was well aware of how wet behind the ears I was. So for every little critical judgement I made, about point of view, about voicing, about pace, I sought out advice online to tell me if I was doing the right thing or not. I needed permission for everything.

Some of this was useful of course. I learned to be more concise. I learned to avoid using a thousand varied speech tags. I learned how many tears I should cry when I received my hundredth letter from an agent. But soon I noticed that the world of writing advice was not as reliable as I thought:

1. A lot of the advice was simply recycled, which made me wonder if the advice was actually valid, or if it was making the rounds simply because it had become convention.

2. Many things I needed to know, or was curious about, were either not addressed, or given very shallow treatments. For example, seeking an answer to what style is and how it works gets you quite generic answers about your use of language, as if that’s all there is to say about style.

3. Things were often stated in ways that were far too black and white, like “don’t use adverbs” and “show don’t tell”. But anyone who has been writing for a while, knows perfectly well, no such rigidity exists.

4. Many writers, even the great ones, disagree with each other. So which was the smart one? Which was the right one?

I started to realise that what I was reading should not be conceived of as knowledge at all. Instead, I was simply reading ideas. Some were good ideas. Some were bad. And in every case, each idea was up for debate. In short, I realised that I wasn’t looking for other people to be good judges of writing aesthetics, I was looking for a way to be a better judge myself.

school.

As I already mentioned, much of this mistaken attitude about the nature of knowledge acquisition in writing comes from schooling. Remember high school English class? Remember how you were supposed to do essays?

1. Acquire your book for the semester, generally some archaic text that few teenagers (myself included) have the patience to read, let alone read properly.

2. Leave the reading of it until the very last minute, and then resort to stealing quotes from friends, reading the blurb, and watching the movie (if applicable).

3. Produce the essay according to the very specific structure set down by every English teacher you’ve ever had, as if filling out a form.

4. Put in a lot of big words and complex sentence structures to sound smart.

For most of us, we leave high school with the impression that there’s a formula to good writing. If I can simply apply the formula (topic sentences, evidence and argument, link, big words, insert quote, blah blah blah) then I’ve written something good. So, the obvious conclusion is that writing is about getting true knowledge of how it’s done into your head, and learning to apply it on paper.

This extends to pretty much every subject in school. Take science for example. In much of the science curriculum, what you’re presented with is a range of facts. To be good at science, I thought, was to know these facts. To any actual scientist, this is ridiculous. Science is a method, not a body of knowledge. If it were a body of knowledge, then scientists around the world wouldn’t be building immense rivalries and hatreds with one another over their dissenting viewpoints (which is absolutely what happens).

School teaches us that knowledge is a realm of facts. But we’ve been misled, whether we’re writers, quarrelling biologists, or brow-beaten office workers. We think we must find facts and repeat them, and that’s what it is to be smart. But to be smart is not to have something. It’s to be something, to do something. It’s about certain kinds of mental processes, not about conclusions.

It’s those mental processes I advocate for.

within.

Plato is famous for many things: his belief that we should be ruled by a sort of philosopher king; his belief that the physical world of the senses is a mere reflection of the true abstract realm of ideas; and the particularly whacky idea that literature should be banned for its corrupting influence.

But it’s his theory of recollection that instructs us on the internal nature of learning.

In his dialogue, the Meno, Plato takes a servant boy through a series of steps in a geometry problem. The boy is previously untrained in geometry, and is at no stage given any answers; he is only led by questions. By the end, despite never being given the answer, the boy comes to the correct conclusion.

But how could this be? If knowledge is something we learn from the outside, then the boy surely shouldn’t have been able to solve the problem.

Plato’s explanation is that the eternal soul we all have, before our birth into physical form, had access to all pure and perfect knowledge. As living physical beings, what we’re doing when we learn something to be true, is simply remembering what we used to know in our immaterial form. This may seem outrageous to us now, like the notion of a flat earth, or that Pepsi is better than Coke. But the basic insight still stands: true knowledge comes from within.

All of us, whether we see it or not, derive all of our epistemic, aesthetic, and moral judgements from a basic intuition. Was the boy recollecting previously known truths from his prior immaterial life? Probably not. But he was following some intuition from within, about right and wrong information, about true and false judgement. He followed the internal “aha” moment we all have when we finally “know” something.

We’ve all had this experience, when the answer to some difficult problem finally makes itself clear in our head. Before words, there is only the feeling, the feeling that this is right, what David Hume refers to as approbation.

What this shows is that we’re always the driver. So the best thing to do is to take responsibility for this and grab the wheel with both hands, rather than letting the well-worn road take us where it will.

understanding.

What I’ve tried to establish already is that we are searching for internal satisfaction, the approbation, the “aha” moment. The problem is that this is far more work than the shallow fact finding sort of knowledge. But the work is worth it, at least some of the time, because the quality of knowledge is vastly different. One is built on understanding, and one is not.

Let me explain.

I know what the chemical formula for water is. That’s the kind of question you get in Trivial Pursuit that everyone wants: a freebie. But all I know is the term H2O. That might seem like I know what water is chemically, but it’s actually a fairly empty fact. Here are some things I don’t know:

properties.

I don’t really understand what a chemical formula represents. Yes I know it’s two hydrogen molecules to one water, but what does that really mean? How do those molecules interact? What keeps them together? And what about those interactions give water its own properties? Then also, what are molecules themselves? Not their names but their forms, their properties, their functions.

method.

Not only do I have an incomplete picture of chemical water, but I don’t have good justification for holding the limited picture I already hold. How do we know this is the chemical formula? How was the answer arrived at? How do we know we aren’t mistaken?

I’m not saying these properties and methods aren’t knowable. I’m sure someone knows. But the reason they know, the reason they understand, is because of a history of cognitive struggle. They had to overcome gaps in information, develop working mental pictures, test things, revise ideas on new information, and so on. Basically, they do not get their complete picture from outside, but from inside.

With water, I feel no need to go inside myself and do the difficult cognitive tasks. I’m satisfied with the shallow fact of H2O. But I’m not satisfied by shallow facts in writing. I don’t want to be able to repeat sentences about writing, given to me by some expert. I want to grapple with ideas myself, to explore them, to attempt my own picture, my own system, my own unique window. This is effortful but it’s the only writing knowledge I want.

originality.

On the one hand, I want true understanding simply for its own sake. Truth is a value that need not produce some other good. It’s good for it’s own sake, at least for me. But even for those who don’t value truth for its own sake, there is an instrumental reason to become autodidactic: it helps promote originality.

First things first, I’m aware some people think originality isn’t possible. I will write more extensively about that claim elsewhere, and for now speak only to those who believe originality is possible.

The fundamental practical problem with trying to catch knowledge from the outside, is you become a mouthpiece for other people’s judgements, reasons, sentiments, and beliefs. You have relinquished control, like a child with a steering wheel in his mother’s car, thinking he’s driving because he’s copying his mother’s movements. She is the one behind the wheel, making the car move. The best he can do is look the same.

There are two basic reasons why looking at the external world for knowledge only gets you derivation, and conversely, two things you can take personal command over so that you are not derivative.

observation.

Every person has a unique window onto the world. I notice the beads of water on the blades of grass after a frosty morning. You notice the smell of orange rind in the café just before they start grinding the coffee beans. No one sees the same world. And for those bits I see that you also see, we do not see them in exactly the same way.

The same goes for the kinds of things we notice in written work, and likewise, the same things we might want readers to notice in our own work. It may well be the case that certain writing “facts” can help you be noticed in certain ways, a bit of vivid description here, a well-placed comma there. But you really need to be the one who makes that judgement.

George Orwell may be right to say never use a short word where a long one will do. But what will do? What will do right here and now? And for what reason? You must determine what needs to be seen, noticed, interpreted by a reader, and judge what will do for yourself. Otherwise, all your prose will look like a poor imitation of George Orwell’s concision.

invention.

Knowledge is, of course, not only exploratory in nature, but creative. Knowledge is something produced by humans as a response to what they notice about the world and themselves. The task then is to self-communicate the world in coherent ways, by grouping the mushy blob of reality into systems, categories, and basic terms. Without this, things have no edges, and the world is a shapeless lump of clay.

However, what we tend to do is take other people’s systems and mimic them, forgetting that those systems are themselves inventions. Let me give you an example:

Some time ago, teaching high school students prose fiction writing, I noticed I was instructing them often about what mode they wrote in. Some would write only description. Some only exposition. Some only dialogue. That made me aware of the fact that such modes exist in fiction. Then I wondered, well how many are there? So instead of looking for what someone else said, I cam up with my own list of five:

1. description

2. dialogue

3. exposition

4. internal thoughts

5. narrator’s commentary

There are other ways I could have divided these. For example, dialogue and internal thoughts could both come under a broader category: speech. There are other categories that could exist. For example, an action category. But I chose to divide the conceptual space in the way that made most sense to me.

The point here is to illustrate that I will write about these modes in a blog post and some people will mistakingly think of them as facts. But really they are an invention I use to help me understand the sorts of ways prose presents itself in fiction. I do this so I can have a greater degree of control over my own writing.

The by-product of producing my own system is that it gives me an edge of originality. No one else has the same system. And so no one controls their work in quite the same way. I make myself original as a writer, by making myself original, first as a thinker.

hybridity.

I can already hear the objections:

You think you know better than the experts?

Why are you telling people to just make up their own facts?

So I need to make it clear that I’m not advocating that people disregard external learning. I’m not saying this at all.

Learning, like all human activity, is ultimately a dualistic process. We are internal worlds in contact with external worlds. All experience, whether intellectual, emotional, or sensational, is a meeting of these worlds. So to be an autodidact is not simply to make up whatever knowledge you want to make up, it is instead to take responsibility for how you learn, who you learn from, and the language in which that learning is represented and expressed.

The fact is, there are other people in the world who have gone through their own relevant internal cognitive processes, and come up with really interesting and valid things to say. I’d be foolish to disregard what other smart people have produced by way of knowledge.

If I’m looking to produce my own understanding, and looking to make it as complete as possible, I should see what others think. My mind, after all, is a limited thing. It doesn’t see the world in full, but only a a sliver of the world in line with my mind’s idiosyncratic dispositions. Other minds give me other pictures, so I can produce a compound picture of the world.

I might like what they say and choose to adopt it. I might hate what they say and choose to contest it. In either case, or any other case that might arise, the engagement with another mind always produces fruit.

But even here, it’s important to notice that you are still the ultimate judge. Don’t just assume because Aristotle said it, it must be true. If scholarship worked this way, we would never have advanced past the middle-ages. Be sceptical. Critique the value of all external knowledge, even when it comes from a so-called master.

You are in fact doing this already. Even when you say “I should accept this because Aristotle is an expert”, you have made a judgement: the judgement being that experts should be listened to without question.

What I ask is only that you realise you’re already an autodidact. And by making that realisation, you should lean in, and live up to the potential of a self-developed mind wherever possible.

Be the judge. It’s a blessing that you are one, at every moment, and in every judgement. Nothing make you freer than realising the control you have already.

That being the case, look at both internal and external elements of learning:

internal.

1. play with ideas (experiment)

2. create your own systems and terms

3. attempt to understand concepts, objects, and events in all their detail

4. ask questions that aren’t answered yet

external.

1. seek out thinkers to fill in gaps you can’t manage yourself

2. research the thinkers you believe can aid you

3. dig deep into existing scholarship to see what frameworks are useful

4. read and listen to broad information for inspiration and more rounded knowledge

There is of course much more to be said about how to do the process of internal understanding and external fact finding. But the point stands: it is you in the driver’s seat.

le fin.

Writing is a rewarding task, and a rewarding life if that’s the one you’ve chosen to live. But it’s not always easy. And for those of us who want to always be better, to turn the better phrase, to capture the better sensation, the struggle is life-long. But it’s a journey we are all equipped to handle.

We are each a teacher of ourselves, whether we know it or not. I say embrace this. Enjoy the struggle to understand that comes from deep intellectual reflection. This is both your right and responsibility as a thinker, and as an artist, to leave your unique ripples in the waters of time, so that the world may know you, and not confuse you with the ripples of another.