Urges and Impulses

I had the urge to sleep in this morning. I’d had an alarm set – I always do – for a bit after five in the morning to get up and write this post. If I have it done ahead, on rare occasion, I shut off the alarm and roll over to sleep the sleep of the just. Then again, more mornings than not these days I have a kitten cavorting over me before settling onto my chest to purr loudly enough the neighbors are wondering about distant thunder. Her timing is impeccable. She knows I get up at 5 am. You can’t say cats aren’t smart enough to tell time.

This morning I chose to sleep in, and write this post a bit late, but it was a calculated decision. You see, last weekend we were busy from Wednesday until late in the day on Monday. This weekend I’d planned for Saturday supper at my house to be a simple, laid-back meal (hotdogs and hamburgers on the grill, potato salad, coleslaw, banana pudding and poundcake for desserts. All-American cookout fare). Then I had someone invite themselves to my house for lunch, and I’m trying to get it clean and ready and dealing with my son having built a grill during welding class for me but it’s not done yet and… I slept in. I shut off the alarm, went back to sleep, the kitten opted to wake the boy rather than me, and it felt wonderful. I’m not sorry I did it.

The art of writing is portraying humans. I mean, you can absolutely write aliens, but to get your very human readers to connect with the stories, there needs to be humanity in there. Humans are impulsive. We listen to our guts, which is not the same as doing whatever we have an urge to do. In my case, I had the urge to sleep more, but I didn’t give into that just to be lazy. The opposite – I have a very long and busy day ahead of me, taking care of friends and my own family, and I need the extra rest now because I won’t have another chance to sit down, it looks like, until late tonight. This is a calculated equation based on experience.

Listening to your gut is a far more complex equation than you might think. It’s based on reading unconscious signals that you aren’t processing on the surface level (at least, not initially) and then acting on them in a conscious manner. In some cases, you don’t have time to do all the mental math involved, you need to just react to the gut signaling that it’s time to be elsewhere, fast. It might look on the surface like an impulsive, even rash decision, but the reality is far deeper.

How best do you write this in fiction? You can’t weight it all to the after, in the story. If you do, you risk losing the reader. Ideally, you’ll want to foreshadow this subtly, so as to make it clear the character doesn’t even know what’s going on. Oddly, this can be done better in film than in writing. Music from the score, lighting, and ambient noises all make up an uneasy sense in the viewer that is very difficult to pull off – but not impossible! – in text. Similar effects can be had by describing the scene a bit. Not in huge detail, unless you ordinarily do it, but perhaps a bit more detail if you don’t go in for much. In your dialogue tags, you can use vocabulary to convey heightened emotions from the characters. When you are writing in ‘god mode’ or third-person omniscient, you can even describe hidden motivations, but this will give away some of the tension in most cases.

And you should take the time to go into it after the decision. In the aftermath of the gut call, take a little time to go into what tripped the alarm – or sparked the impulse. Explain for the reader, don’t assume they picked up on the foreshadowing, as they might not have. For that matter, most of us mere humans who acted on an urge don’t always realize what we were doing until later. Sometimes we can’t explain it at all. And a few people never investigate their own motivations, but that’s not useful! How will you know what to write if you don’t know why you did it?