Great Writing Has Soul - You Can Find It Without Drafting A Word

Too often in the past, I wanted to create a piece but didn’t know how. Even if I understood the topic and had a strong command of English linguistics, the words wouldn’t flow. It wouldn’t matter if this piece meant the world to me, or if it was just another article meant to appease a freelance employer of mine so I could put food on the table.

I was stuck all the same. I hated it, and still do on the days where I find myself most affected.

However, I recently came to understand better some philosophy on thinking that’s been around for 2,400 years that helped me, and therefore could help you.

I delved into Aristotle’s body of work recently, and ideas from his De Anima books stood out to me. In the first book, Aristotle lays out a series of questions that allow him to begin his approach to solving the conundrums he faced in his attempts as a naturalist to better understand and classify living creatures.

While written works are not alive in the way that you and I live, I noticed parallels between his questions and the kinds of questions one must answer before writing. As such, I’ve put together what I believe is a set of questions that guide your writing, context on why these questions are the ones to consider, and what all this means for the “soul” of you and your work.

Although I have written about the means by which I record and organize my notes before, there’s something worth touching on with regard to brainstorming as a writer: the habits we form in our research matter as much as any habits we curate for the act of writing itself.

In other words, I believe that brainstorming and research, being the genesis of worthy writing, represent the first stage of writing, and are therefore important to treat as such. If your information sourcing, research curation, and/or outline synthesis steps aren’t up to snuff, you’ll sabotage your chance to create something amazing before you ever put pen to draft.

And the troubling issue about this initial step in writing? It’s possible that it never gets corrected.

Sparingly little content or reporting on writers covers how they generate their ideas, or synthesize those ideas into their works. Readers care about what they interact with, and the first-order facet they see is the written piece itself. Thus, you get questions concerning the content of the piece and the considerations of it.

Few people probe into the outlining process or the research that went into the book. Those that understand this craft care about these second-order separations from the piece because they understand that that sort of work is necessary to create the piece in the first place.

Yet, that sort of scrutiny for the research, by the nature of it being questioned less, means that the techniques and approaches don’t get questioned, an issue I seek to correct with this piece.

That issue can be corrected with one piece of advice: stop asking whether an idea is any good, and instead ask what the idea for your piece is.

In other words, don’t try to evaluate the piece into existence. Determine what you do and don’t know about your piece’s genesis, and work your way up from there.

This is why I described this newsletter earlier as being inspired by Aristotelian empiricism. By determining the aporia, the questions that we are perplexed and unsure of about our work, you create the horizon you must travel to solve your piece’s gaps.

It’s the same technique used by Aristotle, especially in his book De Anima on what the “soul” of a living thing is. By recognizing what he doesn’t know, he affords a framework by which we, as writers, those of us seemingly unrelated to the world of naturalists, can understand what our piece can be composed of.

There’s wise advice that ideas are worthless, that only the ideas that turn to productive outcomes are the ideas worth entertaining. While it’s not sound advice for all forms of thinking, it’s great utilitarian when it comes to one’s productivity and determining what should get one’s attention.

But, as I pointed out above, I’ve witnessed the loops and paralysis I experience when deciding on what deserves my attention in writing. I have notebooks full of story and poem ideas that I enjoyed crafting in the moment, but have no desire to go back and flesh out into full pieces.

There’s a reason for that: they don’t have the soul I’m looking for.

Before I delve further, I want to explain that, for this newsletter, I’m borrowing the definitions of “body” and “soul” from Aristotle’s definitions of those terms:

These definitions are greatly truncated, but are suitable enough to give you context on what I’m trying to explain here. Any religious preconceptions held by you, dear reader, should be checked at the door for now lest this metaphor cause undue confusion.

With that said, I believe these concepts parallel the language we use in writing, especially creative writing, to describe pieces. We describe how a writer sets out their language, the grammatical and vocabulary choices, and mechanics of syntax to represent their work, but also cover the ways that those choices create powerful relations in ideas or beautiful prose that evokes imagination and wonder. This is the idea of body and soul applied to writing.

I see these relations as such:

It’s easy to say that one begets the other. The soul of the piece can’t exist without its mechanics; otherwise, the piece could never be conveyed. Yet, the soul, the meaning of the piece, transcends the words on the page or the screen, meaning it must exist outside just the written word.

This is where the term entelecheia, often translated as “being-fully-itself,” comes into play. A creature is said to have entelecheia when it acts in accordance with not just its physical capabilities, but also uses those capabilities to act in a way that best causes that being to flourish.

Our writing should be no different. However, unlike living beings which must act out in the world to discover this alignment, writing can have its entelecheia determined before the draft begins thanks to the lack of understanding we already established earlier.

Aristotle lays out twelve questions in De Anima, all geared toward directing his efforts to understand best what comprises the soul of a living being. As we’ve established that the language around writing mirrors the language of discussing living things, this means that the perplexities posed back then can be used today.

I see four movements across these questions: the determination of what you’re asking, the determination of what something is, the decisions needed to start, and the purpose behind all this work. In the interest of brevity, I believe these movements come down to the four terms of Approach, Substance, Structure, and Aim:

And so, across those movements, you answer these twelve questions:

If you want something to fill out alongside this newsletter, I’ve created a free Prewriting Interview PDF you can use along the way:

Let’s touch on how each of these questions relates to one of the four movements.

Questions #1 and #2 represent the determinations you must make about what your approach to quality writing is. Considering the pursuit of your inquiry and the means by which you will ask your questions sets the stage for the entire process. Whether that process is solely answering these prewriting questions or a greater review will differ from writer to writer.

Meanwhile, determining what constitutes good writing will depend on your tastes. For instance, I believe that good writing contains not just strong adherence to the accepted mechanics of grammar and syntax, but also enough deviance from those rules to create points of intrigue in the work with the intention of capturing the attention of the reader at key points.

If you have ever wondered why my sentence structure deviates as it does, this is why. A long, flowy sentence with grandiose vocabulary paints a particular image in the reader’s mind.

A short, punchy sentence brings it home.

My determinations are not the only ones to be made, to be sure. Since I can’t know what your markers of quality are, I suggest starting with this movement of questions to set the baseline for what your adherences will look like as we continue on.

Questions #3 through #6 cover your understanding of what the content and character of your writing should contain.

Questions #3 and #4 help you determine to what extent the piece exists in both physical form and in your mind. Most likely, if you’re using this framework, you’re partially complete in one or both of these realms. But, as with the questions in Approach, we’re determining what we know and what we don’t before proceeding.

Questions #5 and #6 are where we reach the comparison point to something beyond self-determined measures of quality or process. Here, we seek to answer by what measures the writing we want to do rhymes or borrows inspiration from other works. As this framework is meant to cover both the brainstorming and research facets of writing, it is important to think about where and how you source your inspiration.

A while ago, I determined that if LLMs are here to stay, sharing what I think is the best way to find predecessor information with it while preserving your ability to think was important. Check that piece out if it interests you.

Either way, once you know how this piece would relate to a greater body of work, you can then determine in what ways that happens. This is the point of Question #6 and its reference to specifications. We’re naming, at this point, how your style, content type, interpretations, all of these facets rhyme or differ from others.

The goal here is to force the understanding between you and your predecessors so you can better push into something novel.

Questions #7, #8, and #9, and their associated answers, will tell you by what means you believe your piece will be crafted.

Are you starting from a grand idea and building downwards into the minutiae, or do you have a small seed waiting to bloom into something bigger? Do you have several ideas that you want to bring together, but haven’t yet pieced them together? Does this piece tie into a greater throughline of your work, or is it a standalone piece?

Answering those questions and providing the reasons why those are the answers gives you clarity on what sort of piece you want to draft in terms of its structural components. It is by these answers that we move from the brainstorming to the creation of a written piece’s outline.

In other words, this movement of questions shapes the body of our work.

Questions #10 through #12 guide you towards the point of doing all this writing in the first place.

When you answered Question #9, did you discover whether the mechanics or the meaning was more important to you? When looking at the mechanics of writing, is it enough to use those tools for your piece, or is the application of those tools more important?

For pieces, it is enough to adhere to satisfactory English and call it a day. I was a student, and so I recall the times when I crafted essays with no personal interest or stake beyond the desire to get a passing grade. In other times, I stayed up until sunrise writing for something that wouldn’t obviously benefit me, but meant the world.

I want you to know the “why” of your writing just as much, if not more, than the “what” and “how.” Answering that why will not only provide clarity on what the animus, the soul, of your work is, but also be the North Star you can point to when motivation flags.

Filling out the document or otherwise answering these questions isn’t your full answer to this interview. By the end of those twelve questions, you’ll know what you want this piece and why, but look at how you answered those questions.

What did you skip over because you didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t want to know, the answer? What did you rush through because it didn’t seem important?

Any time that there was friction during your answering of these questions, note that and continue going through them. Through the end of this practice, you’ll have all the examples of what parts of your brainstorming and research practices are lacking.

Take, for example, an inability to explain what the throughline, the logos, of your piece is. If you can’t name that without issue, it means you’re attempting to draft without a controlling or overarching idea.

Likewise, if you skip the whole-level questions, you’re building from fragments before you understand how those pieces fit together.

Skip four or five questions total, and you’re starting work on this piece way before it’s ready to go.

All of these points aren’t ones I provide to shame or belittle you. Rather, it’s meant to be taken as a diagnosis of where your prewriting habits are strong and weak. In addition to crafting our piece, we are auditing our foundational habits and learning where we need to improve.

In fact, I encourage you to go through this process even if the answering of these twelve writing-focused perplexities feels hard, confusing, and tedious.

Answer things out of order. Jump around from question to question, solve the easy ones first if that is your proclivity, or sink your teeth into the tough ones if you prefer. I want this interview to feel messy, especially if a prewriting routine isn’t a habit of yours.

The only non-negotiable thing here is answering all twelve questions. Doing that in spite of the difficulty is the entire point.

I speak from experience when I say that these procedural habits can help to solve many of the issues writers experience when going into meaningful work. I have an entire habit stack that I walk through before I sit down during each drafting session, which includes the results of all the prewriting brainstorming, researching, and ordering of thought that I do for this content.

I made that stack because I needed it, or else I stressed without a means to release the pressure. My mind would spiral with possibility instead of focusing on the known path.

So, regardless of what kind of thinker you are, observing yourself as you answer these questions makes more than just the body and soul of your writing self-evident.

In the specific translation of De Anima that I read, the author likens the body and soul of living beings to a string quartet by Mozart. The piece, written for four musicians, can be said to exist because it is recorded on paper and then played by those musicians.

However, the piece didn’t exist before Mozart imagined the composition and wrote it out. Without Mozart’s input, the meaning of this piece couldn’t be enjoyed by others, meaning the body wouldn’t be necessary. Two parts that need each other to create a bigger whole.

That’s the idea of entelecheia in creative works. The musical composition is more than the notes on the staff; it’s also the emotions and thoughts that music is meant to represent. That meaning doesn’t matter if there’s nothing to represent it.

This Prewriting Interview is meant to help you achieve the same thing. It’s meant to help you identify the means by which you want to create your written work, and what its legacy or effect on others should be.

All the while, you learn how your approach to later works can be improved.

If this explanation doesn’t show how the brainstorming and research steps of writing matter, then almost nothing will convince you. If a framework that helps you define matter and meaning for you and your work all at once doesn’t excite you, there’s nothing left to say other than to download the Prewriting Interview PDF and give it a shot for yourself.