When I was an art major trying to master drawing, my professors would sometimes say that drawing well required “learning to see.”
The phrase always sounded too mystical to me. But now, after having done a lot of writing or “drawing in words,” I understand. Writing can only be as powerful as the perceptions of the writer. As with a drawing, a finished piece of writing is only a record of a mental process, and the keener the observations are, the more satisfying the art is likely to be to the viewer.
I recently wondered: How much do I really notice in my surroundings, and how much of them do I filter out? When I go to a restaurant, do I notice specific details? The lurid atmosphere? The waitress with a heavy application of fuchsia eye shadow? If someone were to test me on my surroundings, how well would I do? I live in my head a lot, so my score would certainly be less than perfect
Last week I did an experiment. I began recording anything I saw in my notebook, no matter how apparently insignificant. I described the way my cat moved, the way an elbow looked when bent, the hovering appearance of dragon flies, or how it feels to walk in wet flip-flops.
They are the kind of close-focus details that in fiction can strip away the boundaries between the writer and reader and simulate the appearance of real life. My “observation” day was a fun day. As in visual art, a verbal sketchbook is not about the quality of the product. All that matters is the act of observing. Observing is a skill that requires practice, and practice yields more significant and interesting observations over time.
Why is observation essential to writing well? Because, regardless of syntax, word choice, and grammar, writing will be thin if the observations of the writer are thin. If a writer thinks in stereotypes, or writes what he thinks he is supposed to think and feel, the writing will feel “off.” In the same way, a story full of greedy Jewish characters and harlots with a heart of gold, unless it is satire, will not ring true and will appeal only to the shallowest thinkers.
Mature writing requires “throwing off” the observational filters that come from growing up in a particular culture with its particular biases. An example is its ideals of what is beautiful. Can a crack on a window pane be just as beautiful as a sunset on a beach? Absolutely. I had an art professor who saw the lined hands of her elderly relative as being so beautiful she felt compelled to draw them; she saw in them graceful patterns that lent themselves to the sensitive line work of a pencil.
Although not everything an artist does is meant to be beautiful, good artists train themselves to notice what others fail to appreciate, and their gift is in letting the viewer see how they see.
I first began thinking about the importance of observation when reading one of my favorite books A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I have always admired his style for his vivid imagery and sharp sensitivity to character details. I have many times studied the crisp quality of his sentences and his powerful active verbs, but there was something else about his writing I could not seem to pin down until I realized the magic element was the rich depth of his observations, whether he was writing about a person or a tree. They said something about who he was and how he thought even when he was not sitting down to write. This description of trees captivated me:
Between the buildings, elms curved so high that you ceased to remember their height until you looked above the familiar trunk and the lowest umbrellas of leaves and took in the lofty complex they held high above, branches and branches of branches, a world of branches with an infinity of leaves. They all seemed permanent and never-changing, an untouched unreachable world high in space, like the ornamental towers and spires of a great church, too high to be enjoyed, too high for anything, great and remote and never useful.
I love this passage for his word choices and the beautiful rhythms of his sentences, but those would be nothing if not for his observations of trees and his own subjective feelings about them. The passage worked because at some point John Knowles had looked at actual trees and given serious thought to them.
To be a writer only when writing is not enough to achieve full potential. Writing requires a constant and even obsessive sensitivity to detail that is not afraid to deviate from general opinion. Writing well means finding beauty and patterns in the seemingly insignificant, a process called learning to see.
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