Welcome back, writers of tumblr! I’ve loved reading your prompt fills for Week 1 and answering your insightful questions, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with for this next prompt.
Last week we talked about the things we love, the things we go and retrieve, that we can hold in our hands. This week we’re talking about loving the things that find us, the parts of the world that come into our gaze by happenstance. In other words, the anatomic matter of all art: observation.
Observation relies on attention, and our ability to attend relies on circumstance. It’s impossible to pay attention to everything at once, so the mind selects what to notice and what to ignore. Sometimes we attribute conclusions to our observations and move into perception. I think as children we make great observers, but when we grow up and gather enough experiences, we fall into the trap of mundanity. Things we’ve seen before and that we’ll see again, so they’re not worthy of note—eating breakfast, putting on your shoes, going to a restaurant and telling the host how many people are in your party.
The art of noticing, of curating all the rich details of life, is a fight against mundanity. To do that, you have to carry your inner child around with you, pointing things out that you’ve seen a hundred times before and allowing yourself to witness them with new eyes. As writers, newness is a skill we can always improve.
Airports are one way I practice newness. If I have to choose between a one-hour layover and a six-hour layover, I’ll always choose the latter. There’s no mundanity in airports. Aside from employees and people who travel frequently for business, everyone is doing something outside of their usual routine, and it’s so much easier to soak up the minutiae that we otherwise miss when we’re walking our usual daily paths.
On Love
Someone once told me, “Love is paying attention.” The person who told me this was an artist and her subject was her family. Portraiture of the people she loved was the closest attention she could offer. And I agree—you naturally attend to that which you love. When you love a person, you pay attention to the clothes they wear, the tenor of their laugh, their mannerisms, the things they carry in their purse or pockets. But I think it can also be expanded: the more attention you pay to yourself, the more you love yourself. The more attention you pay to the world, the more you love the world. This idea can be a two-way street: love will direct your attention; attention will lead you to love. In other words, if you practice paying attention, you will come to love things more than you already do.
A quick note about neurodivergence: some people attend to the world differently than others, in different patterns and with different guiding forces. Some people have the ability to shift attention quickly, and some slowly. Some people have more control over their attention than others. Some people attend more closely to certain senses (like hearing or feeling) than others. Wherever you’re at, whatever is driving your ability to notice, use it as a strength. There is no mode of observation that is inherently better or worse than another.
Many writers struggle with motivation to write. I have come to reluctantly agree that there is some discipline necessary in being a writer. I don’t believe in “butt in chair every day” mentality, but I do think any skill requires a patterned dedication no matter what your practice looks like. A self-promise. That promise is much more easily kept if you focus on love.
I don’t mean writing love stories (although that’s often what motivates me). I mean sincerely meditating on what love means to you. What you love, who you love. I’ve participated in so many generative workshops and there’s always a moment I receive a prompt and go, “I have no idea what to write about.” And then I ask myself, “What do I love?” Many things come to me, both big and small, abstract and concrete. I love my family and friends. I love to travel. I love holding a book in my hands and the satisfaction of turning its pages. I love parts of myself and I don’t love others, and this is something I’m working on.
When you ask the question, “What do I write about?” the answer can always be love. When I ask my students to write about what they love, some of them write about their relationships—the joy of a present relationship or the ache of a past one. They write about their hobbies and friends and interests. Once I had a boy write twenty pages of poetry about frogs. Some people write about passion that toes the edge of love and hate. Love is not always good. Love can be destructive. It can motivate people to cruelty; it can distort perception. Love can be complicated and weird. Love can lead to regret. But love is a strong feeling, and strong feelings drive creativity.
On Sharing
I think sharing the things you notice, the way you see the world, is an act of love. Carrying around your inner child to show them what they’ve never seen is a way to nourish yourself, replenish what you expend. You can apply this to any aspect of writing you want to work on. If you want to set a story where you live, you can go around your city pretending you’re showing it to someone who’s never been there. If you want to develop your characters, pretend you’re about to introduce a close friend to someone else, and you know they’re going to get along once they meet. If you want to better explore your themes, pretend you’re talking to someone who has no concept at all of your worldview, who maybe has an opposing worldview but is interested in learning yours.
People, especially writers, can be so afraid to put themselves into the world. To see and be seen. But when you begin to view sharing as an act of love, it becomes easier to listen, to bear witness and say, “Thank you for sharing that with me.” And when you say that enough to others, it also becomes easier to share yourself, in hopes that you’ll be met with gratitude.
Prompt time!
What I’d like you to do today—or tomorrow, if it’s late—is to notice three things. Three seemingly insignificant details, things you would otherwise forget or maybe not even see (or feel, hear, etc.). Bonus points if you write them down in a notebook, but the notes app on your phone will do.
Even if you don’t want to do it, simply by virtue of reading this, I think you’ll begin noticing things. If you’re a very observant person with a good working memory, maybe you can think of three things you observed earlier, and maybe that’s effortless for you. If this is you, your task is to write not just three observations, but three paragraphs of observation throughout the day.
Here’s an example: I am at this aesthetically pleasing coffee shop but I’m concentrating on the flimsy paper menu fluttering beneath a fan, held down with a ceramic plate. The tapping sound of my sister’s acrylic nails on her MacBook. My own self-consciousness that everyone has a better sense of style than I do. One of the baristas is a young man who looks like an ex of mine, and I’m wondering where that ex is, if his hairline has fully receded, if he still works at FedEx, if he ever married that nice veterinarian’s assistant who was way too good for him and always wore tye-dyed t-shirts for some reason, and I honestly liked her a lot, she seemed like a genuinely good person, and he knew it too and that was why he treated her well, so why had he treated me so poorly?
And now I have a narrative question: Why do people hurt some loved ones and not others? What is it about the chemistry two people make that causes this to happen? The only way to answer these questions is to either live it all again and take notes—and I’ve had too much therapy for that—or write a story about characters navigating this chasm I’ve found in my understanding of being human. And I got all that from sitting here on this uncomfortable stool in this nondescript coffee shop, hanging out with my sister on a Friday afternoon.
I recommend taking an entire day to find your three things. You’ll find many more than three, but for the purpose of this activity, I think focusing on the three most interesting or compelling ones is best. Once you have your three things I’d like you to work them all into a piece of writing. Here are some ways you can approach this:
- If you want to write nonfiction, write about your day, focusing on building around your three things to eventually pull a story out of them, the way I did above. Follow the associations and memories that arrive to you.
- If you want to write fiction, write those three details into a new story or the world of your current work in progress. If you’re not sure how, make the first your inciting incident, put the second in the middle of the story, and end the piece with the third.
- If you want to write poetry, make a poem of your three observations, and note what happens to the meaning when you squeeze three disparate observations together.
- If you want to do something experimental, convey your three things with a stylistic constraint of your choice. For example, write only in sentence fragments (by that I mean, no verbs).
A quick caveat: You might be thinking, but Betts, I write science fiction (or fantasy, horror, etc.) and so nothing in reality is of relevance to me. I would argue that everything you perceive in reality can be applied to all things that are created. You think they don’t have pretentious coffee shops in space? Well, maybe not. And definitely not in a magical version of medieval Europe. But there might be something akin to a nondescript strip mall in Midwest America with cracked asphalt, half abandoned, with some kind of sketchy dentist or urgent care in it and a vape shop. Every place, even places that don’t exist, possess some realistic texture, and when you render these images, that space becomes real to the reader. You could argue, even, that the goal of genre fiction is the highest possible suspension of disbelief. And the only way to do that is to make the world you build feel as lived-in as reality.
Questions? Ask ‘em here before EOD Tuesday so @bettsfic can answer them on Wednesday. And remember to tag your work #tumblr writing workshop with betts if you want her to read your work and possibly feature it on Friday!
And, for those just joining us: @bettsfic is running a writing workshop on @books this month. Want to know more? Start here.
