Two Writing Functions: Receptive and Executive

One that allows your characters to come alive. One to craft sentences which draw the reader into the scene.

In a Go Into The Story interview I did with screenwriter and filmmaker Robin Swicord, the subject came up: How do you approach writing dialogue. Here is an excerpt:

“I think that all of this dialogue comes out of the characters themselves. What happens… there’s a kind of mystical transference that happens when you’ve done this very deep thinking and feeling about your character. You begin to embody your character. I literally feel like a character enters me sometimes. I don’t worry about writing the dialogue. I just sit at my desk and feel their presence, and then they speak and I write down what they say. Then later I’ll come back to the page, and I’ll go, ‘But I don’t like this scene.’ Or ‘I don’t feel like we need this scene.’ Or ‘I think this goes on too long.’ The writer in the room starts adjusting things, so what’s on the page is not just mental run‑on sentences of dialogue. We have two creative minds. An executive mind, a planning, strategic, putting‑my‑ducks‑in‑a‑row mind. But that’s a different kind of writing than the receptive writing of hearing your characters and embodying them. We need both. One mind where you sit and craft sentences that draw the reader into the scene. Another that allows your characters to come alive.”

I talk about this a lot in my classes. Both aspects of the writing process are critical. It is imperative for us to engage our characters directly and immerse ourselves in their lives, so that we dopen ourselves to them — in other words, receptive writing. That provides the raw material, hopefully much of it a kind of direct download from our characters.

Afterward, we can look at what we’ve written with a more critical eye, mindful that we have to transform that content into what works on the page as a scene. This is executive writing — editing, shaping, tightening, making sure our characters’ actions and dialogue serve the story and move the plot forward.

Of course, sometimes scenes don’t work, so we have to reconnect directly with our characters and go through the process again. And again. There’s no formula to success here, we need to keep working with our characters and emerging content flipping from receptive to executive, back and forth, rewriting each scene until it feels right.

That said, every writer is different. Some may have success focusing entirely on their receptive mode. I am reminded of that exchange between the late great playwright August Wilson who, when asked by a college student how he wrote such great dialogue, responded, “I don’t. They do.” The ‘they’ being his characters. They were that alive to him, so his writing process appears to have been very much in receptive mode.

Other writers may spend most of their time in executive mode, slaving over every… single… word… applying a kind of logical rigor to the writing.

Hey, whatever works!

For most of us, however, I suspect we work with both functions and find them equally important in our writing process.

How about you? Are you more of a receptive, executive, or both writer type?