So what are mental representations, and how will they help us become great writers? Well, from page 58 of Peak:
“A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.”
That definition is a bit vague, so here’s an example to make it more concrete. Think about where you live. You have a fairly good idea of where everything is, right? If it was dark and I asked you to get a glass of water, you could probably do it without much of a problem.
Now imagine you were staying in a house you’d never visited before. If I asked you to do the same thing – get a glass of water in the dark – you’d probably have a much harder time. Even though you know the general requirements to complete the task, such as finding which cupboard the glasses are in and getting water from the sink, there’d be key details you’d struggle with. Which cupboard are the cups in? What type of faucet is it? And is there anything in the way that might- ow, my toe! Goddammit, where did that chair come from?
It’s the same request in both scenarios, so why is it easy in one and hard in the other? Simple: the mental representation you have of your house is excellent, and the representation of the unknown house is poor.
Our brains use mental representations for more than just facts. For example, while a pianist does need a strong mental representation of the raw notes in a song, they also need representations of where to put their hands and how much pressure to apply to a key. They even need representations of more ethereal things, such as how to shift the mood of a song by adjusting the speed, volume, and pedal work of their playing.
All that leads us to one of the most important findings in all of Dr. Ericsson’s work: mastering a skill simply means building really, really good mental representations of everything that goes into that skill.
Why is that important for writing? Because it explains how to become an expert. My first forays into creative writing were extremely frustrating; I could tell my writing was sub-par, but couldn’t understand why. Great writers clearly had something I didn’t, but besides their many years of practice I didn’t know what.
The idea of mental representations clarified the difference. A great writer’s mental representations of clear prose, story structure, and the characters, setting, and events in their story were all vastly superior to the representations I had of my own. I had a vague idea of the story I wanted to tell and how to write it, but like a person stumbling through an unknown house in the dark, my mental representations were not good enough to reach my goal without wasting time rifling through cabinets and banging my toe on a chair.
In addition to helping get it right the first time, when a person has good mental representations they can often notice their own mistakes, even without external feedback. If an expert pianist misses a note, they’ll usually realize it immediately because the sound they hear suddenly diverges from their representation of what the song should sound like. This sort of self monitoring requires that the practitioner already have high quality mental representations, so it’s not a good way to start learning a skill. But as the practitioner’s skills get more advanced it can become an invaluable tool for continuing improvement.
So now we have a clear goal: to make our mental representations as good as expert writer’s. How do we do that? With the subject of the next blog post: Practice.
