John Keats was right when he said the best writers and artists shed their ego when creating works of beauty that conflict with their worldview. This single observation took the literary torch from the Enlightenment and lead it into Romanticism. Intellectualizing poems and stories no longer made sense; the ability to cast off those layers of personhood we hold so dearly when writing meant we had to cultivate some notion of ambivalence, the penmanship of Zen. Shakespeare did it, Proust did it, Keats did it, and many others. I have tried to do it, though I'm not always successful, and I didn't have the maturity when I was younger, though I am doing it now, by explaining how this is relevant to me. Oops.
The idea behind negative capability is to abandon reason and simply present. Invite the reader into your world without having to explain things. Let their imagination do the work for you. Let your characters come to life, don't put restraints on them due to your personal preferences. Be comfortable tapping into that dark side of you that would have sympathy for a villain. Let your characters change, evolve, become multi-dimensional, do something crazy they otherwise wouldn't. Try not to be too preachy, unless you're writing an essay or something. Let your endings be loose enough to the point where it isn't obvious that you take a stand on how things turned out. Your role is to tell, not judge. You say more by saying less.
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