How To Use Metacognition To Write More Creative Stories
Is your story a mindless zombie looking to butcher your reader’s time?
The Great Gatsby. A Game of Thrones. The Lord of the Rings. The Cather in the Rye. To Kill a Mockingbird. Jane Eyre. Foundation. Dune.
Why do so many like to read these great novels? What is it that makes a story hit? Can we ever write as creatively as the great masters?
No storyteller will explain to you how they became creative. For the best writers, the stories just happen. Stephen King thinks his life molded him into a storyteller. That’s it.
But science can help you understand what a novelist may not be able to explain. Enter metacognition.
Metacognition is an awareness, a feeling of what we know.
Metacognition is your ability to have knowledge, awareness, and control of your mental processes. Thinking about what you know is how you evolve yourself. If you want to write creatively, you have to be conscious of all the things you know — in the present moment.
Some people are better at writing engaging stories than others. So the crucial question is: why do only a few people write a lot better than others?
One reason: they think about their writing process.
Without fully immersing yourself in the story, your story will feel automated and lack emotions. Your piece needs a plan, a strategy, some kindness, a little soul-searching, and an intelligent structure. All these things are impossible if you are not in the story — if you are not thinking about the unfolding story.
Writing well requires metacognition.
I am always trying to write more creative and engaging stuff. Since I knew nothing about metacognition, I decided to explore it.
Writing that lacks emotions alienates your readers. Metacognition can help us correct this.
In my mind, the metacognition works roughly like this:
Me 1: “Will this bit of knowledge help the reader at this point?” Me 2: “No. I think it is too much.” or “Yes. They should think what they are going to read is based on research.”
Me 1: “Do I need some powerful questions at the start?” Me 2: “Yes. I am trying to answers some of the questions in my mind. Meta-cognition is such a fuzzy thing in my mind. I want to understand it and use it in my writing.”
Me 1: “Is the conclusion of my story just right?” Me 2: “I hope I can summarize and provide some takeaways.” And so on.
Feel your story. Is it happy, sad, or dull?
You become more creative by thinking and becoming more aware of what you have written. Analyzing your work promotes creative thinking. Knowing the underlying thought processes of your writing makes you more metacognitive. This cycle never stops and makes you an honest writer.
Writing is not a race.
If you hurry while writing, it’ll show. Your story will seem like a mindless zombie looking to butcher your reader’s precious time.
You can deliberately improve your creativity by understanding it better:
Batey’s 4-P model of creativity
Batey’s model has these four principal parts:
- Person — individual traits, characteristics, or personality
- Process — thought process required for the creation of ideas
- Press — social and cultural influences
- Product — what the creative activity leads to
Your creative writing involves the 4-Ps. Your story is a series of mental processes.
If you hurry, you’ll miss something. Your story will not sound like you, or it’ll lack structure. You may write as if you were in the 1990s. Or you may fail to see that the final product is a piece of crap.
Why my pasta is not tasty
You must have forgotten to add salt or pepper. Or something in the recipe. Why did you miss it? Can you add it now?
Adding some things to your cooked pasta may not be possible, but you can add more to your story by rewriting some parts of it — at any time before publication.
Q: How do you know what it lacks? A: You taste it — the pasta or the story.
Q: How do you taste a story? A: You use your metacognition — get the mental feel of it.
Try to read the story from a reader’s perspective. Then sense how it feels. Tasty? Bland? Disgusting?
When you pinpoint a thing that makes your story bland or disgusting, you can rip it out of the story or add something new to spark interest.
Learn to write and reflect
No good writer hits the publish button without thinking about what she has written.
“Think before you speak,” the wise say. “Think before you write and then think after you have written it,” is what metacognition researchers say.
Studies by neuroscientists show that ‘the brain regions responsible for creative thinking overlap with the brain regions used for thinking about your thought processes. These involve the dorsolateral prefrontal and ventrolateral prefrontal cortexes.’
Writing short sentences and paragraphs helps you to structure your story better. Like lego blocks, you can add, move, and remove parts of your piece — if you want.
Think. Write. Reflect. Change.
Roy Bradbury uses metacognition.
Jack Clayton, a British film director, wanted to bring Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes to the screen for Disney.
It is hard to cut the unimportant for beginners. But if you see what is needed, the rest can go. This anecdote is from a story, Shooting Haiku in a Barrel, from Bradbury’s book, Zen in the Art of Writing:
Roy Bradbury gave Jack Clayton a 260-page screenplay. That meant six hours.
Jack said, “Well, now you’ve got to cut out forty pages.”
Bradbury said, “God, I can’t.” Jack said, “Go ahead, I know you can do it. I’ll be behind you.”
Bradbury cut forty pages out.
Jack said, “Okay, now you’ve got to cut another forty pages out.”
Bradbury got the screenplay down to 180 pages, and then Jack said, “Thirty more.”
Bradbury said, “Impossible, impossible!” But then he got it down to 150 pages.
Then Jack said, “Thirty more.”
Jack kept telling Bradbury that he could do it. Bradbury went through the screenplay one final time and got it down to 120 pages.
“It was better,” writes Bradbury.
Final Thoughts
One thing we learn from writing and then reflecting on it: it makes writing a slow process.
The better you become at writing, the slower you write.
The most prolific writers write slowly — by immersing themselves in the story. They believe they are writing a great story. They don’t hurry. They write — they show up at their writing table every day, without fail.
When you use metacognition:
- You spend time analyzing the content and think about what you wrote.
- You challenge yourself to rewrite a better version of your ideas.
- You try to remove the things which a reader might already know.
- You carefully make your story informative, entertaining and educating.
- You consciously make an effort to cultivate a creative mindset.
Successful writers use metacognition, the feeling of knowing (FOK), to improve their writing process.
Would somebody recognize that you wrote this story? If you think they’ll identify you, then you are present in every word, every sentence, and the whole structure of your work.
Giving your pen your personality is how you write stories that are at least 2x more creative.
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