Write What You've Observed

What you observe is interesting, because it is interesting to you.

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Of equal importance to your writer’s toolkit is your skill at observing life. If you don’t take time to notice what’s happening around you, how can you ever know what to write?

As with write what you know, observation is advice that is often interpreted at the surface level, as simply what you see, but this skill encompasses much more. If you had good teachers, they encouraged you to observe with all your senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. What they might not have suggested is that observation also includes your emotional and intellectual engagement with what you observe, your opinions as well as your memories.

Even good descriptive writing can feel flat if the writer does not engage emotion and opinion. You can write flowing sentences with evocative sensory descriptors, but still fail to bring the reader into the experience of a scene. This is especially important if you are writing memoir or creative non-fiction, or fiction from a close POV. For the point of view character – yourself in memoir, your protagonist in fiction – the feelings invoked by place are as crucial as its sights, sounds, and scents.

Observation is by its nature biased. You are allowed to have opinions about what you see.

What have you observed?

Trick question! You see things every day. The longer you’ve lived, the more you’ve seen. But how much have you noticed? How much have you committed to memory or written down? What has stayed with you because it triggered a strong emotion or opinion?

Probably more than you think.

As with feelings, a good place to start is with a list. Don’t worry about whether your list might be interesting to other people. The point here is to find the material you already have, which includes where you’ve been and what you’ve observed.

Your childhood home, other places you’ve lived, a college dorm, your friend’s house, the mall, your church, your first job, your best job, a park, the mountains, the beach. An art gallery, a museum, a movie theater, a concert hall. A city street, an alley, a backyard, a swimming pool. A grocery store, a restaurant, a coffee shop.

Make a list of people and write what you have observed of them. Friends, family, co-workers, students, a boss you loved and a boss you hated. Describe them physically and emotionally. Who are they to you? How do they behave? Obnoxious and annoying people are good material for observation, in part because they are likely to stir strong emotion and opinion.

Don’t go overboard. Start small. Start stupid. If you are writing about an art gallery, your first sentence might be “There were pictures hung on the walls,” and you might think, “Well done, Sherlock. We’d never have noticed.” But who cares? No one will see this first sentence. Your job is not to start brilliantly but simply to start. Describe the art, the blank walls, the flooring. Who is there? Why are you there? What did you feel? Did you like any of the art or not? Did not liking the art make you feel superior to someone who did?

You might get stuck. That’s ok. Go through your senses and write down declaratory statements. I saw, I heard. Work your way to what your emotions and opinions. I felt, I liked, I hated. This is the writing equivalent of practicing scales on the piano. You may start out clumsily and the task may feel a bit repetitive, but eventually, you’ll make the right notes.

As you would train your fingers to find the correct keys, you are training your brain to notice. You may find that more details come to mind as you write, with more specificity. Describing your art gallery, you might remember the white walls and laminate flooring, and then some specific pieces of art will come to mind, the ones that made the strongest impression on you. As you write that, you might suddenly recall a server passing hors d’oeuvres and the crackers with a chunky green compote that tasted like cold fish oil, and you remember not knowing if that green stuff was supposed to taste like that or if you should mention this to the server. Did you mention it or were you afraid you might reveal yourself as a common person with an unsophisticated palate? Let your thoughts and memories carry you where they will.

Don’t force it. As with what you know and what you feel, you may feel compelled to seek the profound observation. You don’t want to describe the diner on the corner, you want to write about an ancient cathedral or a majestic mountain view. And you don’t want to merely describe it, you want to make sense of it. You want to say something important about life.

Don’t do that. That’s not your goal, and regardless, you can’t force that kind of observation. It is sufficient to write what you observe with your senses and feelings and opinions. The rest will come. And you might find that the corner diner leads you to that profound observation, because it’s an intimate location, a place you know well. You might find something interesting to write about yourself in connection to that seemingly small, boring place.

Don’t sell yourself short. You might omit something from your writing because you assume no one else would find your observation interesting. This is a terrible mindset. Purge it before it takes root.

This kind of thinking is bad for your creativity. When you begin to write, whether you are in the early stages of exploring the craft or drafting a story, everything goes on the page. Brainstorm without limits. Explore whatever looks interesting to you. Don’t worry whether someone else will like what you wrote down. There will be time for that later.

This habit is also bad for your soul. In essence, you are admitting – without trial or evidence – that what you see in the world isn’t interesting enough to share, that your observations aren’t worthy of talking about. This isn’t true.

That’s not to say that you will produce prize-winning prose fresh out of the gate. You won’t. But you should – I would argue must – start with the premise that you have unique experiences and a point of view, and both are worthy of exploration and expression.

Imagine if other writers had felt this way. What if J.D. Salinger had convinced himself that no one would be interested in his observations about adolescence, grieving, or dissociation from modern life? What if Sylvia Plath had believed no one wanted to read poems about her father?

Your observations are worth writing down. Your point of view is worth sharing. Being yourself is always worth it, even if you are your only reader. What you observe is interesting, because it is interesting to you. That is all the permission you need.

When you adopt a wider definition of write what you know that incorporates what you feel and what you’ve observed, you move beyond the limitations of hard fact and begin to tap into your most powerful raw material – the life already inside you.

The best part? There’s a lot more to explore.