After a brief hiatus from working on my novel (I got stuck on a major development arc for a main character and spent the last few months revising nonfiction instead), I am getting back into the story. Doing so has as much to do with “feel” as it does with motivation, plotting, technical prowess, etc. I was introduced to the idea of feel through horsemanship. Most horse people could give you a decent explanation of what they mean when they use this term.  David, one the main characters in my novel, talks about feel in an early chapter of the book:

“It’s a little like fly fishing,” he says. “Do you fish?”
“Sure.” She smiles at the surprise on his face. “My grandfather taught me. He even tied his own flies.”
“Well, so it’s like that. When you’re casting, you’ve got to get the right amount of line out in the water. If it’s too short, the fly doesn’t float right and a fish won’t go for it. Too much slack and you can’t feel a strike, and you sure can’t set the hook even if you feel the strike.
“With a horse, the reins keep you in touch with his mouth. You can’t be hanging on all the time with a tight rein. He can’t move if you’ve always got ahold of him, so you’ve got to give him enough slack to use his head, to balance and look around, to float. But you want to be able to make contact, to feel him coming back up the reins to you, too. Like feeling a strike. It’s about feel.”

Feel is developed in any pursuit on which we spend our time and attention.  Athletes often describe being in the zone, and this I think is similar to feel. You know exactly where you are in relation to everyone else on the field, understand how much to ask of your body and how close you are to maximum exertion, settle into a rhythm perfect to the moment. In a team sport, you are aware of where your partners or teammates are and where they are going to go, and you hold this awareness alongside the same grasp of your own position.

I am discovering feel in my writing, too. It comes to me like this: I may be stuck on something – a transition, scene, piece of dialogue, large-scale timeline – for a very long time. I work on the writing and tweak sentences and re-read scenes I’ve already written. I might start writing a scene for a chapter that comes much later in the book. Then I start to feel the story, to get a sense of the weight of the decisions characters are making and a sense of what those tensions are building to. I feel rather than plot the major movements of the entire story and hold them with gentle attention in my mind – when I try to pin them down, iron them out, they fold, break, slip away. But if I leave it at feeling that shape and weight, then I come to an understanding of how to proceed, can follow the feel right out of the stuck place and on into the story.