How to be a Better Writer: Watch the World

Look until you see something new, for the writer is the watcher of the world. – Francis Flaherty, The Elements of Story

Inspiration isn’t always easy to find, but it’s generally easier to find when a writer watches the world. The world is a never ending place of sights, sounds, smells, and experiences. The writer who notes those things develops a vast resource from which to draw.

When she comes to the page, she doesn’t speak of a generic blue; she writes of a blue the color of the bluejay that dive-bombs her cat. It’s a bold color, cerulean, not the hazy, soft one found in the early morning light. It’s vicious, too. The blur of blue strikes, wheels away, strikes again, much like an artist attacking a canvas with a loaded paintbrush.

Smells, too, are a way for her to introduce an idea and awaken her readers’ senses. She writes of baking cookies with her mom and shares the all-too familiar tale of a pan left thirty seconds too long in the oven. The scent of burnt sugar cookies lingers in the house for days to come. She tells the story, and her readers recall their own incidents with burnt cooking and baking. They smell the smell again, and the story becomes tactile. They have an anchor to which they can hold as the writer continues to lead them ever onward in whatever tale she has decided to write.

The story of burnt cookies and dive-bombing bluejays are old ones, but the writer doesn’t despair in the writing of them. The details are hers. As she makes them her own and weaves them into her writing, they become something new. They change in the telling.

They change in the noticing, too. What the writer observes one day about the bluejay changes the next. She sees the bluejay land in a tree, hears replying cheeps. The bluejay is no longer a vicious blue, but a maternal one, periwinkle, a blanket tucked around the baby boy who coos and waves his fist as his mother walks by pushing him in a stroller.

Image: Phil Roeder (Creative Commons)