How To Sharpen Your Intuition

Interrogate your first impressions. Do you ever look at a place or a person and get a certain vibe? Does it take you all of a few seconds to be confident you're talking to a certain kind of person? When that happens, take the time to ask yourself what it is you might be seeing or hearing that's making you feel this way. Then ask yourself if this conclusion is actually rational, or whether you jumped to unfounded conclusions somewhere. (For example, does this situation give you the creeps because there is something genuinely creepy going on, or is it because the ambiance resembles another place where something creepy happened?) Doing this sort of thing seems to help you learn to identify and weed out nonfactors, which makes your intuition more accurate overall in the future.

Get into the practice of clearing out your preconceptions. Fictional characters are a great place to do this - think about the character traits and emotions that you believe them to have. Now, stop and ask yourself how many of them are actually in direct evidence, and how many of them you might be interpolating, projecting, or transferring onto them from prior experience or study. You can do the same for almost anything else that has traits and characteristics, too. Ask yourself what traits and characteristics actually have direct and immediate evidence for them (IE, what is there that firmly indicates the traits and characteristics you believe or suspect them to have), and which of them you might be reading into or projecting onto this thing (IE, those which have no direct evidence present, but that you are interpolating or inferring based on previous experiences and personal biases).

Always remember that equifinality is a thing. The term "equifinality" refers to the same outcome resulting from many different paths. It's always important to remember that most endpoints can come about from a number of events and causes, and that you can't simply determine that it's the first one you think of without carefully ruling out any others. For example, many people who sound arrogant and self-absorbed genuinely are, but some are actually incredibly insecure and are overcompensating for it by trying too hard to seen relevant or be useful, and others easily get so focused on trying to communicate their deep and complex ideas to others that they fail to notice that they've completely dominated the conversation and that everyone else is getting bored with them.

Exercise your subconscious with activities that require quick, decisive judgments. Examples include fast-paced games, improvisational dance, and writing two characters arguing for different points as fast as you can. You can also check out development questionnaires and try to answer them as quickly as possible. Don't worry about answering right, wrong, or even well - just go with the first thing that comes to your mind.

Relax and take a slower approach sometimes. You might look at a character development question list and try to empty your mind as much as you can (don't worry about achieving perfect emptiness!), then consider each question and write down the first answer that comes to mind. You mind also try the creative exercises on this page. You can also play word association by yourself - whether with words in a book or on a screen, or with the names of objects you can see around you.

Study and observe how things work, and pay attention to why they work that way and what pushes them to work that way. The more you understand how and why things work the way they do - whether physics, government, social dynamics, etc. - the better your subconscious mind can simulate hypothetical situations. This is very useful in worldbuilding, plot development, and character creation.

Study and research everything. Look into history, nature, and science. Find out how something gets made, or research ways to make something. Find out how certain myths and legends evolved over history. Any time you see or hear an interesting tidbit, make a mental note of it. Remember, the more you pick up, the more you have to work with.

Be willing to update your knowledge and correct misinformation wherever possible. Remember GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your brain is given bad input, it's going to give you bad output. You can also avoid absorbing a lot of bad information in the first place by polishing up your logical reasoning skills and being wary of anything that sounds particularly fantastic, outrageous, or sensational. (Never forget, a little fact-checking never hurt anyone!)