Writing from Both Sides of the Brain--Some New Discoveries

Jess was a smart and polished lawyer who was a dedicated student in my writing classes many years ago. After writing hundreds of law briefs and legal articles, she began attempting a novel.

It was a love story. She crafted a hundred pages before she signed up for my writing class. A hundred pages that felt like a slog. She hated what she’d written so far.

She’d done all the right things. She read my book, Your Book Starts Here, then designed a storyboard and chapters created from a brainstorming list of topics she wanted to explore in the novel. She set a time each day to write and kept to the discipline.

But the writing was linear, factual, and lawyer-like. Not what you’d expect for a love story. When I read her draft, it felt as if she’d written a law brief then plugged in regular periods of romance. Her dry language sparked no emotion in me as a reader. And obviously, Jess herself was uninspired by it.

Jess was persistent, committed to learning the steps to craft a good story. She knew she had a great book idea—and I agreed. But she was only listening to one side of her brain. And we need both to write.

Sides of the brain

I’m no neuroscientist but I love reading the research about how our creative selves work—or get stalled out. We have a linear and a random side, and most of us lean towards one or the other naturally. Jess was super developed on the linear side, what some call the left brain. I’m over simplifying this, but it’s a useful model to understand what Jess discovered as she taught herself how to write a love story—and what I learned from her.

I could see right away that Jess could use training in listening to the non linear side of her brain, but this was surprisingly hard for her. It bucked her natural preference for logic and analysis, for telling.

So we brainstormed a plan. Here’s the list of assignments I gave her.

Pay a lot of attention to the senses—taste, touch, sound, smell, sight

Go on solo outings to places inspiring these senses and take notes on what

you see, smell, touch

Begin a touch journal—jot down what things feel like

Read novels and short stories that are strong in images

Watch romantic movies instead of the documentaries you prefer

Begin having fresh flowers in the house and eating home-cooked food

Take long walks and afterward write down favorite images

Listen to music—different kinds than you usually listen to

Jess was dubious. She cited no time for walks, music, flowers. She said I was asking her to change her life.

Brain training

A wonderful new book by sociologist and writer Martha Beck, Beyond Anxiety, talks about when Beck met neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight. In this short but stunning memoir, Dr. Taylor reveals how after a sudden left-brain stroke shut down her left brain, she learned what it was like to operate just from the right brain.

For hours after her stroke, Dr. Taylor was aware only of what the right brain delivers--sensory details, images, wholeness of being. In the bliss of right-brain beingness, she was barely able to save her own life.

Her left brain, which is home to ordered, logical thinking—the kind Jess was so used to, the kind necessary to pick up a phone and call 911—had been all but annihilated by the stroke. It would take years of rehab to bring it back to life. Dr. Taylor had to learn all over again how to read, to add, to make decisions.

This dramatic experience of losing her left-brain functions changed Taylor’s entire approach to living. She slowed down, did less, but much to her surprise found she enjoyed life more.

As Taylor says, we tend to use more of one side of our brains. We need both. Beck goes even further, educating us on how to deliberately change our way of working with these different sides of the brain, so we can be both more relaxed and more creative.

Both sides make a book

We often miss the full potential of our writing journey by not tapping into the right brain, the side I was trying to introduce to my student Jess. If manuscripts develop primarily from the voice of our dominant hemisphere, in Jess’s case the left, the journey will be full of blind spots and unnecessary roadblocks.

Neither the linear left brain nor the image-rich right brain can create a complete book by themselves. Using the whole creative self delivers both coherent structure and emotional engagement. Both sides working in concert turn every book into a more complete vision.

Jess took up the challenge of freeing her right brain. The newly embraced creative self began to speak up. Her writing changed. Novel scenes, very good ones that packed an emotional punch, emerged.

I didn’t predict the next event, but I wasn’t surprised. Jess fell in love. She sold her practice, and she and her lover moved to another country. Falling in love is very much a right-brain activity. A person in love suddenly appreciates detail, especially sensory detail. Love changes your percep­tions about everything.

Which side do you favor?

As writers our first task is discover which side is taking up the most room in our creative process. Asking good questions can help you learn which side you are favoring, and which you are ignoring.

If you are naturally ordered in your writing, ask ques­tions that propel you or your character into awareness of senses, which comes from the right brain:

What did it smell like?

What sounds did you/she/he hear?

What time of day was it?

If you tend toward the meandering and random, ask questions that track time sequence or logic, which comes from the left:

What happened right before this?

What will up the stakes right now?

What could happen next?

Our second task is to train ourselves to use both, to switch readily between them, using our whole creative selves and making our books publishable.

If your writing is a wild animal

I’ve also worked with writers who are polar opposites from Jess. “My material is way too emotional to access all the time,” said a new memoirist. “It’s a wild animal; I have to keep it contained.”

A skilled essayist and mother of three told me she loves to write random, but she stays in her left brain to survive. “If I let myself get dreamy, I get instant chaos at home. I want to write this book but not if it means giving up control of the rest of my life!”

Please know that working with your non-dominant brain is not about giving up what you do best. It’s about open­ing up to more, trusting the part of your creative self that gets less air time.

If you’re naturally organized, keep the left-brain control, the structure—it’s essential. Just add in the beauty your nonlinear right-brain self can contribute.

If you’re one of the rare right-brain dominant, then you will need to learn to embrace a structured writing system that can help bring order to your freewheeling words.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

1. Find an event from your childhood that evoked strong emotion.

2. Write about it for 20 minutes, using the sense of sound as much as possible.

3. Pause and close your eyes. Briefly scan your physical body for any sensations that might have arisen as you wrote—are you feeling a bit dizzy, nauseous, euphoric? Do you have a buzzing feeling in your head or a tightness in your throat? Write about your present-time physical body sensations for a few minutes.

4. Now go back to the childhood memory and continue writing, using the sense of smell.

Share your thoughts, ideas, questions, and reactions below.