Discerning Writers - An Aristotelian Framing For Five Writing Capacities

The language used to describe different skill levels in writers and explain how those differences arise comes across as vague, taste-based, and unhelpful. Numerous folks interpret it as subjective feedback dressed up as intellectual analysis, with biases on full display as a reviewer describes their favorite author as “phenomenal at weaving dialogue” without explaining what parts of the dialogue make it prominent in the field.

Generalized statements like this don’t bridge the gap between where someone is in their writing capabilities and understanding what that writer must do to take the variables that worked for another writer to receive such praise and integrate them into their works. This example describes the praiseworthy outcome, but never gives the reader of said praise a map to that goal.

As a warning, I will make no specific callouts here on any reviewers, writing mentors, or folks of the sort. I’m not interested in tearing down someone else’s inability to communicate these factors because I am guilty of doing the same at points in my life.

Instead, I want to share something that’s been rattling around in my mind as I delve into various philosophical bodies of work I believe most relevant to writers today. In my last newsletter, I covered the complexities presented by Aristotle in De Anima, drawing comparisons between the questions posed to understand a living being’s nature and one’s own writing. So much of the language we use to describe art, including writing, is couched in the terms we use to describe other life, and the answers to the writing-themed complexities in that newsletter are a good starting point to understand one’s craft.

However, it won’t cover the ways you, the writer, relate to your craft. More specifically, they won’t show your skills as a writer and how they stack to form your complexity, rather than your work’s.

So, to frame writing once again in the works of one of the world’s first recorded empiricists, I present an adaptation of his five capabilities of the soul of living beings, translated from recorded understanding of life to an understanding of what you can do as a writer, and how to evolve alongside your craft.

Like many writers before me, I ascribed to the idea that I was a “type” of writer, a label that described all of my capacities within a singular label. Theoretically, this meant I understood my strengths and weaknesses in my craft and in my practices. With that knowledge, I could therefore reinforce those strengths and mitigate those weaknesses.

The problem was that adopting a type as my frame of reference meant that I didn’t leave room to evolve. A label, with its defined edges and containments, doesn’t offer obvious means in and of itself to change the label used to describe someone within it.

In other words, you label yourself as a type of writer and later become something different; you might impair yourself by refusing to drop a label that once held true and no longer is.

For example, I long described myself as having poor memory because I needed reminders and schedules to stay on top of my writing tasks each day. After almost a decade of sticking to schedules that I was always in control of creating and finishing, is it still accurate to say that I have poor memory for my writing work?

Or, did I stick to a label because it was true at first, and then spoke down about my updated skill stack by continuing to associate with that label?

I know which one I believe to be true.

Thus, you shouldn’t view yourself within the context of a label. Rather, what you do and what those actions create are better metrics to measure yourself by. By doing so, you measure the effects of you and your work on reality, and not just what could otherwise be a false perception grounded in the past, not the truth.

Skills and capabilities, to a good extent, can be taught and learned. One cannot say with honesty that they can’t do something without having tried to accomplish it.

Both statements being true means that a skill isn’t missing, but rather dormant. A weakness isn’t falling; it's a missing rung on a ladder that can still be climbed.

Aristotle describes the soul’s capacities in a way where each level contains and adds to the previous one(s). Every step is better described as understanding and integration of the previous, not an evolution and abandonment of the previous. A soul capable of perceiving the world around it is also able to engage in physical growth and reproduction of the body. Perception is an added function to the organism, not a replacement for “lower” functions of the body.

For the geometrically inclined, Aristotle describes this as “the triangle inside the square.” In his metaphor, the Greek naturalist describes how a triangle can fit inside a square due to its side length, and similarly for a square inside a pentagon. He does this to analogize how adding additional sides, and therefore increasing the complexity of something, comes with the understanding that all other capabilities below it in complexity must also exist. Otherwise, the more complex shapes would be our foundations, which isn’t true.

I see this analogy in a different way for writing. By connecting a straight line between the opposite corners of a square, you bisect that shape into two triangles. As each triangle is contained inside the square, each triangle can be thought of as being part of the square, but not the total representation of the square itself. You need both triangles for that.

This is true for your skills in writing much as it is for geometric shapes. You couldn’t write if you didn’t understand the alphabet, how to spell words, the definitions of words, the rules of grammar, and the complex twists of syntax, and so on. Each level of understanding of language begets a new layer of talents to unlock, another triangle to add to the square as new shapes of increasing side count flower into being.

So, I think of the capabilities of writers as being these polygons built together by these individual triangles, sided and joined together. In an ideal case, a writer would piece all triangles together to create the greatest, largest shape man can muster.

Going back to geometry, there’s a rule for polygons where a polygon of any number of sides can be divided up into a number of triangles equal to the number of sides in the shape minus two. For example, you have a pentagon with five sides, meaning you can make three triangles inside the polygon. Each triangle represents a different area of capacity needed to achieve the bigger, more complex whole.

So, in cases where a writer struggles to integrate new capabilities, they will piece together these triangles, causing others to unintentionally slip away from the greater whole. Those writers will question why the ideal always remains out of reach because they hold to pieces meant to fit their current labels, never looking beyond the self-imposed limitations.

This is partly why I believe much of the discourse around what makes good writing worthy falls short. Many participants in the discourse don’t know the things they don’t know or don’t do, and it causes their language in their descriptions to be imperfect. Yet, in my experience, having the ability to teach the craft and explain oneself as a writer are the hallmarks of those who have done an incredible amount of synthesis work in their skills and talents.

Thus, someone unable to explain how or why a writer and their work succeed comes down to a lack of understanding in one’s talents, not a deliberate creation of the imperfect description.

The shape collapses because the foundation pieces were dormant.

So, with foundations set and metaphors described, let’s talk about these pieces and what composes them. There are some points to keep in mind as we go from piece to piece:

These points are critical to understanding this breakdown because of the deviations I make from Aristotle’s framing. While he sought to understand and explain the nature of a living creature’s purpose in being alive, I am using the framework to describe writers and their practices.

Much like Aristotle, I want to understand and teach, not pass judgment.

A nutritive writer is, in the literal definition of the word, someone who writes. They are someone who takes to the art of writing, recording their thoughts and ideas down into written language for others to read and understand. This isn’t a description of those interested in writing but never participate; it is the first rung of the craft, where one engages in the craft.

The act of writing is the full definition of this writer, though. They record in their own hand what they see and feel from an endless wellspring, but they don’t notice.

My previous sentence isn’t incomplete. They fail to notice with their own faculties. Everything is a raw recording in words, rambling on with no point or aim. This writer’s actions feed not into the development of something more, but rather into practicing the physical act of writing.

I remember being this kind of writer when I first became interested in the craft at age 14. I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be, but I knew I loved the dozens of volumes of fantasy tales lining my bookshelf. I picked my favorites and wrote my best attempts at mimicking those because I loved the act of writing.

I didn’t have a story to tell, or a point to make. Not in a literary sense, at least. All I knew was that I felt the call to write, so I would pop in my headphones and write, simply for the love of the game.

Perceptive writers layer conclusions about the subject they write about into their works. These writers perceive the world around them and seek to derive meaning and value from these descriptions.

They have the ability to make the first level of abstraction from subject and content to what they believe that content means for a reader. Even more, this is done through their thinking, not someone else’s, representing an evolution from purely descriptive scribblings to meaningful communication.

However, the factors not found in these writers come down to curation. If there is a point to be made about something, they will take the chance to make it, regardless of utility or efficient time and language usage. A perceptive writer knows how to make an argument, but cannot discern when or where that argument matters.

As a personal anecdote, I was this writer in high school. Any time I saw a new genre or approach to writing, I had an opinion on it and would try to adapt that technique or stylistic choice into my work, believing it to be “the right way.”

I had no interest in being selective because I wanted to learn all there was to know about this craft. I was voracious for exposure to and time spent with pen in hand, and leaped at any chance I had to learn, grow, and be heard.

The next capacity I see writers unlock is the discretion we find missing in perceptive writers. Unlocking this capacity reveals the desire a writer can have to pursue worthy endeavors. Thus, desiring writers seek to create works of meaning and value with deliberate aim, while avoiding distractions or bait that would destroy their focus.

However, the focus on a desiring writer stops at the individual piece. Each article, book, or other form factor of written work represents a meaningful whole, but with no interconnected thought or theme. The desiring author knows they want to create something worthy, but doesn’t know how to add that worthiness to a greater body composition.

As an aside, there is a shadow that desiring writers can succumb to, which I believe anyone savvy to social media today knows about: trend chasing. When you know as a creative that you want to make something worthy, and also know that certain topics or patterns currently attract more eyeballs than normal, it’s tempting to adapt one’s work to those trends to get your message out more reliably.

The problem with trends, as seen by the waxing and waning of cultural memes and vernacular, is that those sudden booms eventually become busts. When this happens to a desiring writer falling prey to this shadowy temptation, all that creative will have left is a series of unrelated time capsules from an abandoned era.

I know this temptation exists because I fell to it once. Long ago, I wrote narrative analyses for tales I found interesting, discovering that covering new and/or controversial titles fed better into the algorithm than what I had been doing before. As a result, I focused on those sorts of works, eventually finding that people consumed my content because of the topic, and not for the value I brought to the table.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized what my misunderstanding was, and how to correct it for next time.

The next capacity is locomotive, a development in writing craft where the writer unlocks their capability to create an interconnected body of work. They command the writing process across all its facets, and understand what each decision at each point in time for their writing does for the greater body they will be known for.

Hence the use of the term “locomotive.” They are always moving, whether we’re discussing their process for the current project or for their overall aim. There’s always something in motion because this writer understands that all things are always in motion. Nothing ever sits still in creative works.

However, a locomotive writer is a coal train engine without a single passenger or transport car. They are the singular body in motion along their track, aimed towards a horizon they know their work can meet. However, they can’t take others along with them because, much like real-life trains, they can’t lay new track for others. They only know how to get themselves over the next hurdle.

In all honesty, I see myself as a writer at this stage of my capacity development today. I have frameworks that I’m surfacing with each of these newsletters, offering my best attempts to aid others in this craft at a time that, to the average person, it is vindicating to believe writing is a dying art. They’re wrong, and I intend to show them why, but that’s for another time.

The final capacity unlocked for a writer is one of being fully rationalized. They can take all the moves and methods they use to create meaningful work and show that plainly for others who seek to follow or rhyme their footsteps with this professional of the craft. There’s always a reason why they do what they do, and that reason is logical, internally consistent, and has effective, measurable outcomes in their craft.

Every writer who fails to reach this point does so because they either fail to integrate one of the lower capacities into their work, or fail to learn how to show others how their words work. Mastery of this capacity is the standard by which all of this discernment we’ve done so far is measured.

I believe many writers, myself included, want to be masters in this domain. To have our craft be so clear to us, to be confident enough that the worlds and words we smith will resonate with others.

That’s precisely why I wanted to lay out all these capacities through the Aristotelian lens: to better develop the language for that sort of self-discernment.

With all capacities defined and bounded, the next step is determining where you’re stuck in developing your writing capabilities. Where you're stuck represents the ceiling you're at right now, something we aim to tackle.

For your convenience, I made The Discerning Writer’s Diagnostic: a one-page reference document that summarizes everything covered in this newsletter. Simply go through the matrix, check off the actions you take with your writing, and then follow the Wake It column's advice I give for the first column you don’t currently do.

My recommendation is to take 15 minutes and go over The Discerning Writer’s Diagnostic. I imagine many folks will go through this and think they hit the vague notes of each capacity, and therefore should consider themselves the pinnacle of writing expertise.

That would be wrong. Again, this diagnostic fails if you go through it looking at your internal perceptions, rather than measurable outcomes. If you don’t have aspiring writers clamoring day and night to teach them your frameworks or seeking you for advice, you aren’t the realized version of the rational writer.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll never achieve that pinnacle achievement. Rather, it means you have an aim to shoot for, and all work done along the other rungs of writing capacity will be in service to that goal.

Don’t be the person who mistakes language used to describe points in time as a forever-held point in space. Use the definitions and advice in this issue as guides, not as labels you take with you forever on.