Observe, Experience, Write!

Writers observe everything.  But Zachary, you might contend, doesn’t everyone see everything?  Ah, nope.  It’s the difference between hearing music and listening to music.  One requires active participation, and one does not.  Writers are human-shaped sponges, absorbing experience, digesting it, and turning it into meaningful prose.

Just try it.  Step back from a group conversation when it’s not your turn to talk and listen with your eyes.  What are people saying?  How are they saying it?  Do their faces and body-language agree?  When you’re driving to work, what are the trees saying, what is the ground whispering?  Ask questions and actively seek answers.  Seeing rather than simply being is the first step toward empathetic writing.

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t always a great practice.  Someone introduces themselves to me and what do I do?  Like a highly-functioning sociopath, I listen to the timbre of someone’s voice and gauge whether it dances, skips, drags, or grates rather than actually comprehending their damn name.  It’s a process that leaves me with my foot in my mouth 97.2% of the time, but adds another aspect of nuance to my writerly tool belt.  A good trade?  I think it can be, as long as you politely ask for the name to be repeated without sticking your own foot deeper into your gullet.

Varied observational and participatory experience allows for varied prose.  Notice I didn’t say good.  ‘Good’ comes after tens of thousands of hours of keyboard-face-smash until the gibberish finally becomes semi-coherent and more importantly, your own.

Instead of tending toward cliché, a writer who actively catalogues the goings-on around him will be able to say something fresh about a particularly ordinary subject.  I personally love personification, and here’s an example (most of which got cut in the most recent draft, but that’s okay):

“The shop before us slouched into the ground, tortured black wood out of place beside façades of stone. As his posture suggested, the whole of the building looked on the verge of collapse; He shed his coat of gritty plaster like flaking skin. Deploring windows peered out through begrimed cataracts, too dirty for even the most contentious light-beam to penetrate. Rotten shingles fell like dandruff, and his mouth–the door, that is–was in the worst shape of all. Festooned with rot and fungus and mold, a gap-toothed grin indeed.”

So I challenge all writers to observe and describe and then copy it down.  Stray from cliché and, if ye be a brave soul, post those descriptions in the comments!  Happy writing.

(As a side-note–an end-note, really–I intended to title my first post [title of your post here].  Yup.  Just my strange sense of humor that probably makes me look less net-savvy than I had hoped.)

Don’t steal my words.  They’re mine. ©

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