What the "Big Picture" May Miss

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, drawn from Jungian psychology, groups people by cognitive function, and the starkest contrast lies in two broad ways of gathering information: Sensing and Intuition. 

Sensors―interested in facts―are good observers, focusing on the present, on facts, on what can be processed through the five senses; concrete, literal thinkers who value realism, common sense, and ideas with practical applications.

Intuitives--interested in frameworks--are introspective, looking for possibilities, patterns, impressions, imagination, reading between the lines. I test as high as possible on Intuition.

Neither is better than the other; however, the stronger the difference in cognitive style, the greater the tendency to disparage such a different way of seeing the world. I grew up in a family where both my parents and my older brother had a Sensing preference, so in spite of my good grades in school and college, I thought I had something missing until I was in graduate school in my thirties, where big picture thinking was a great asset and I learned about these cognitive differences. What a relief!

My deficit in the cognitive pathways of Sensors, however, continues to haunt me, most recently in a poetry workshop where we were learning to model our poems after Sharon Olds and Dorianne Laux--"accessible, detail oriented, image-driven poetry," of course following poetic principles, but focused in tight on a moment that can be visualized. 

As excited as I was to be involved again with a critique group, I was really struggling until I found an article about the Sensing/Intuition difference in creative writing. Writers and poets tend to be drawn toward creative work that matches their cognitive preferences and, of course, their own writing reflects their way of perceiving the world.

Sensing Poets:                                                                Intuitive Poets:

are detailed, empirical, and concrete	are abstract, symbolic, and figurative
prefer plot-driven themes	prefer concept-driven themes
employ similes	employ metaphors
like to stay on-topic	are comfortable with fracture
tend to be explicit	tend to be implicit
tend to be linear and chronological	are comfortable with split timelines
prefer scenes to summary exposition	use scenes as a jumping-off point to explore larger themes
point to what’s present to the eye	bring to mind what’s absent from view
They ask: What happened? Were police cars light or dark blue in Wichita in 1970? Does this stanza progress logically line-to-line? They may be wary of speculative leaps and abstractions in a poem.	They ask: What larger question about the human experience does this poem explore? Which opposing forces create tension?  They may look for hidden patterns between the lines of a poem.

I can't change the wiring of my brain, but I can develop new neural pathways with practice, and because I wanted so much to learn this way of writing poems, I was determined to give it my best effort.