I’m approaching the last semester of a 5-year-long psychology degree. Organizational psychology is my field; the experience of meaning is my thesis. It’s been very interesting, but seen in contrast to the sister-field of clinical psychology, it’s been an incredibly theory-heavy degree, with only six weeks spent as an intern.
When I say I study psychology, nearly everyone assumes I will become a clinician. Upon learning I can’t become one, people ask (myself included), what I can, and plan to do once I’m finished. Somewhat hesitantly—thinking of all the HR positions and consulting jobs I can get—I usually answer, “I want to write.” To which the response is usually, “oh.” In their heads, however, I imagine the response to be something like, “then why did you study it for 5 years if you’re not going to use it?” To which I’m imagining countering, “well, that’s where you’re wrong.”
Writing is psychology. And it’s the main area in which I put theory into practice. As I see it, psychology is beneficial for writing in two main ways: the writing itself and the act of writing.
The writing itself
JD Salinger said, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
As a writer, that’s a pretty good effect to have on your readers. And that’s the whole crux of the job: whatever you write will affect them—be it good or bad or just a simple ‘meh’. Now, given there’s a million different ways to say things—thousands of words to choose from and endless ways to arrange them—how do you ensure you end up with a good one?
Well, you can’t really ensure it. I’ve been writing for four years now, and I have yet to find a way of telling whether my articles will be well-received or not (even if it’s not the main point, it’s an indirect way of knowing the quality of my piece). But I’m guessing I won’t ever find a surefire recipe. There’s a randomness to it—both on your part, and on the readers’. Because the moment you write about something new is the moment you lose whatever made your last piece so amazing.
Still, there are ingredients that I try to keep in mind; ingredients that touch on the human psychology. By applying them, I at least have a chance on the good effect. From a simple psychological standpoint, there are two main reasons why people read: They want to learn something, or they want to feel something (and usually it’s a combination of both). Realizing this gives you something to work with:
First of all, your readers have to understand what you’re writing, which plays on the human ability to make sense out of information. Whether you’re successful or not depends on such things as your choice of words, the length of your sentences, and the logical structuring of your paragraphs. The writer’s adage of writing as simple as possible is well-founded.
Then there’s emotion. Getting your readers to understand is merely the base level of entry. As a writer, you also have to make them stay. You have to produce something that engages their emotions from the get go, be it curiosity, shock or genuine enjoyment. Again, your choice of words matter, arranging for persuasion, empathy or laughter—to name a few things. Together, you create a cocktail of emotion that your reader cannot help but sip from.
Lastly, there’s a big one: Humans are storytelling animals. And the truly great stories combine the two points above. We make sense of the world through stories and we also get to experience emotions through them. (The details of storytelling is an article for another time, but in the meantime I will point you to Robert McKee).
The act of writing
Ernest Hemingway supposedly said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” This quote paints a picture that it’s challenging, which we touched upon in the section above. But as it’s alluded to, the hardest thing about writing is how it feels. Bleeding.
I know the feeling. It’s a kind of anxiety; something unsettling creeping inside you with every unfinished sentence. A reason it feels this way, is because doing hard things is against our evolutionary nature; we want to conserve our energy. No one has to write to survive (probably, hopefully), and that’s the whole problem. When we encounter the challenge of writing, there’s a lot of inbuilt mechanisms that tries to stop us from doing it.
We write a few words when we feel inspired, but won’t even touch our keyboard when it doesn’t “feel right”. Similarly, we might feel good about writing what we know about, but then quit as soon as we get stuck on something novel. Lastly, we rationalize our time usage and convince ourselves we are satisfied with less than what we’re capable of.
These are common challenges, at least to me. But I think I would have struggled more with them if it hadn’t been for psychology. Over the years, I’ve learned some things that help alleviate the bleeding:
Habits force behavior. We are programmed in such a way that we fall into what's familiar. By choosing to repeat a behavior, it gets easier and easier until the hardest thing becomes not doing it. One of the main factors in implementing a habit is consistency. Personally, I sit down and try to write each morning—doesn't matter how good the session ends up being; at least I give myself the chance to be good.
Anxiety is a big deal in psychology, and consequentially there have been discovered many ways to regulate it. Here are two examples: Constructive self-talk (replacing negative thoughts with positive ones), relaxed breathing (two consecutive inhales through the nose, followed by one exhale through the mouth).
Finally, simply being aware of human rationalization and bias will improve the ability to recognize them and put them aside. For instance, I've gotten better at noticing when I’m fabricating bullshit stories as to why I can't write, and then I realize I can.
There you have it; the writing itself and the act of writing. Now, you don’t have to go to a university to learn psychology, but I recommend doing some learning on your own, to further enrich your writing. There’s a lot of great resources out there—research papers, psychology-focused books and websites, and there’s even great psychology in literature (after all, writing is psychology).
—Jonas