Reading time: About 3 minutes
If strange words and counter-intuitive ideas appeal to you, read on to learn how jootsing can improve your writing…
The word looks ridiculous on the page: Jootsing.
And it sounds worse out loud. Try saying, “I jootsed today” with a straight face.
Still, the idea behind it is incredibly useful.
Coined by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter in 1979, the word stands for Jumping Out Of The System.
Here’s what it means: Every creative pursuit, including writing, runs on a system of rules. We learn some of those rules because we’re taught them — grammar, story structure, genre conventions. We soak in other rules by osmosis from the books we love and the writers we imitate.
Most of the time we don’t even notice the system. We just write inside it.
Jootsing is the deliberate act of stepping outside that system to see it from above. Stepping out far enough to ask: Why is this rule even here? What happens if I ignore it?
Why jootsing produces breakthroughs
Most writing advice tells you to work harder inside the system. Tighten your sentences. Strengthen your verbs. Cut your adverbs. Each of these rules is useful. But none of them changes the basic shape of what you’re producing.
Jootsing changes the shape.
Hemingway jootsed when he decided that the most powerful thing on a page was what you left off it. The lush, ornate Victorian style was the prevailing system. He looked at it from outside and asked what would happen if he wrote with the spareness of a telegram.
E.E. Cummings jootsed punctuation and capitalization. Toni Morrison jootsed the conventions of who gets to be the centre of an American novel. George Saunders, in his story “Sea Oak,” jootsed point of view by writing from inside an anxious young man’s head while his dead aunt rises from the grave to deliver workplace advice.
Each writer saw the system they were standing in and chose to leap.
The trap of staying inside
When we stay inside the system, our writing tends to sound like everyone else’s writing. We absorb the conventions of our genre and our peer group, and we reproduce them faithfully. The result is competent. But it’s also forgettable.
The real risk is not failure. Not even embarrassment. It’s being forgettable.
When was the last time you read something that genuinely surprised you? I’d bet money the writer had jootsed something — a convention, an expectation, a default move. They stepped outside and brought back a view nobody else had.
What jootsing looks like in practice
You don’t need to be Hemingway to joots. You need only to notice the rules you’re following without thinking about them, and then ask whether they’re serving you.
A few examples from writers I’ve coached:
A business writer who’d been producing tidy three-point essays for a decade tried writing one as a single, long, breathless paragraph. The rule she’d jootsed: thou shalt break thy thoughts into neat sections.
A novelist stuck on chapter 12 abandoned chronological order and wrote her book backwards, starting at the ending. She finished a draft that had been stalled for more than a year.
A memoirist tired of his own voice wrote a chapter as a series of footnotes to an imaginary Wikipedia entry about himself.
In every case, the writer didn’t invent something brand new. They stepped outside a default they’d never questioned and found an idea waiting on the other side.
How to start
Pick a piece you’re working on right now. Then ask yourself three questions.
- What conventions am I following without thinking? Genre. Structure. Voice. Point of view. Even sentence length.
- Which one of those, if I broke it cleanly, would scare me a little? (If your honest answer is “comma placement,” aim higher.)
- What would the piece become if I broke that one rule for a single paragraph, a single chapter, a single draft?
You don’t have to commit. You can always come back to the system. But you’ll have some new ideas to bring back with you.
The most original writers aren’t the ones with the wildest imaginations. They’re the ones who noticed the box they were writing inside and decided to climb out.
That’s jootsing. And it’s available to any of us, any time we choose to try it.
The hardest part is admitting that the system you’ve been writing inside isn’t a law of physics. It’s just a habit with good PR.
Something I’m loving right now…
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Have you ever tried jootsing? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by May 31/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
