Today I want to talk about one of the foundational concepts that powers my writing work: intellectual scaffolding. It is the support structure that surrounds your writing work—the ideas, beliefs, politics, inspiration, and values that inform the writing. It is something that always exists around our creative labors, whether we think about it or not. I find value in cultivating my scaffolding, and in so doing I have thought a great deal about productivity and mental rest.

You might have seen me talk briefly about it in P.M. Raymond’s newsletter, but I’d like to do a deeper dive. It can be a tricky idea to nail down because it’s not a thing you can hold in your hands. So, let’s start there.

What is it?

I learned about intellectual scaffolding in graduate school, from my dissertation advisor, Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith. She’s a fabulous writer, storyteller, scholar, and teacher, and her advice was as much about taking a healthy, holistic approach to my work as it was about the work itself. As we were discussing my dissertation progress during one of our advising meetings, I was frustrated at a lack of progress and was struggling with my analysis.

Dr. Lentz-smith wanted me to resist the idea that I could only do “productive” dissertation work by writing and emphasized that she and her husband (also an academic) had done some of their best work after being forced to put down their metaphorical pens for a while and focused on reading instead. What Dr. Lentz-Smith advocated was not a passive approach to scaffolding, but one in which we embrace the fact that our work doesn’t exist in a vacuum but as part of an intellectual community. To build that scaffolding for my dissertation, I should read more work in my field, attend more talks, and give feedback on classmates’ papers. Those kinds of “breaks” would be opportunities to absorb new ideas that might help consolidate those ideas already floating around in my head.

I learned it in an academic context, but we can so easily apply it to fiction.

Compare writing to a building: An outline would be the foundation, the bones of the building; the rooms are chapters or scenes; and then you furnish those rooms with details and dialogue. Intellectual scaffolding is not part of the building at all. It is, as the name suggests, the scaffolding that you build against the building in order to make it possible to install windows or mount siding.

I write horror and dark fantasy, and my intellectual scaffolding is informed by my dissertation on ideas of gender and race in family life and women’s family rights in the ’50s and early ’60s; my favorite video games; the latest Chinese historical drama I’ve been devouring; the novel I read last week; a “found footage”-style horror podcast. These are all things that have been metabolized in my brain and inform the ways that I think about writing character relationships, pacing, emotional reveals, and monsters.

How do we cultivate it?

I think that, in fiction, cultivating intellectual scaffolding means seeking out and learning from any kind of storytelling, and we are so fortunate in how many kinds of storytelling media we can draw from! But to be clear, I don’t build my scaffolding in the same way I might, for example, conduct research for a new story.

If you read my first post, you already know that I build in space for not-writing as part of my process. I strive for rest; anything that makes my brain feel energized and refreshed is on the table. However, I also take some time to think through what I have been absorbing. If I found it a satisfying experience, what satisfied me? How did the creators achieve that? Did a character relationship feel particularly strong? Is there something about how they wrote a relationship that I can try to emulate in my own work? Was there something unsatisfying? How might I “fix” the story to make it stronger?

I often find that when I turn back to the story I have been working on, I don’t simply feel refreshed but have new ideas for building a stronger narrative. Perhaps I’ve been chewing on a challenging scene or plot problem, or worried about how to build a relationship arc. These problems are not always solved immediately, but I also find myself asking myself new questions about my own work or imagining new possibilities.

However, as I mentioned, intellectual scaffolding has also been a jumping-off point for me to think about what I don’t do, and not-doing that deliberately.

Refusing “Productivity” (At least sometimes, when I’m not on deadline)

We live in a society where we experience a lot of pressure to make every moment “productive.” Capitalism teaches us to hustle, to make every moment valuable, to hurry up and get it done. To some degree, intellectual scaffolding is one way that I give myself permission to rest.

We know that rest is good for us! So many studies have told us that our brains learn and process new information and ideas better when they are well-rested, and I don’t just mean sleep. What intellectual scaffolding reminds me is that every moment has value, even those moments that do not actively add to our word count or result in something that can be directly packaged and sold.

Engaging actively with intellectual scaffolding means I listen more carefully to my body for signs of burnout. In my body, it usually manifests as sluggish thinking and an increasing need to sleep at strange times of the day. That’s my cue to put down the writing for a little while.

We can’t always put it down. Sometimes, the word count needs to happen! But I try to remember and will always encourage other folks to remember that you are always building new scaffolding.

Go ahead, read that book you’ve been excited about. Watch that show. Close your eyes and daydream. I get fantastic and unexpected ideas from daydreaming about things entirely unrelated to stories I’m working on.

You writing can and will wait, and will probably be stronger for the extra breath you’ve given it and yourself.