Writing From Observation
Dec. 11th, 2018 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isozymeI go back to Frank O'Hara's Having a Coke With You when I think of effective imagery in writing. The orange shirt, the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches, the steps and the time of day -- all these small idiosyncratic details that sprung to mind when O'Hara thought of love -- hang with you along with the rhythm of the poem. It's not the specificity of the description, exactly. He could have described the color of his lover's eyes down to the exact Pantone match and it wouldn't have a lick of poetry to it.
Rather, the impact comes from the fact that I hadn't seen these details before. They are, at the same time, surprising and mundane. Good fiction occupies the middle space between the bland and the spectacular.
Repetition will, in time, dull any image, no matter how good it was the first time it was used. So, to produce evocative writing, it's not good enough to find the best prose, poetry or nonfiction out there and reproduce their content. Instead you have to reproduce their methods.
I won't be able to find the original article now, but I read somewhere an author who said, approximately, that he became a writer of literature one day while sitting on a street corner at an outside table of a cafe. He saw that every person who passed by carried their bags differently. The woman hoisting her groceries on her hip, one hand jammed under the paper bag to keep the heavy groceries from tearing through and spilling everywhere, was suddenly distinct from the woman who strode by next with the her grocery sack folded over at the top like an oversized brown bag lunch. I've thought ever since that spending time developing that level of granular observation improves your writing. Details observed in the world will always be fresher than ones derived from other people's work.
That said, it's tiring to write 100% from observed details. Cliches and well-worn phrases form an easy shorthand for both reader and writer. I think poetry demands the skill more often with more consistency, but poetry is a brutal, compacted medium that asks a lot of everyone involved.
My current exercise is to stop using "looked" and "glanced" in my writing. I use pointing out the direction of the POV character's gaze as a crutch, and instead I want to imply the direction of their gaze by describing what they see. It's hard, and when I'm writing fic I don't bother with any of this at all because I generally don't care if my fanfiction is profound, I just want it to scratch a narrative itch and move along, but this is what I think about when I'm trying to improve my fiction.
Rather, the impact comes from the fact that I hadn't seen these details before. They are, at the same time, surprising and mundane. Good fiction occupies the middle space between the bland and the spectacular.
Repetition will, in time, dull any image, no matter how good it was the first time it was used. So, to produce evocative writing, it's not good enough to find the best prose, poetry or nonfiction out there and reproduce their content. Instead you have to reproduce their methods.
I won't be able to find the original article now, but I read somewhere an author who said, approximately, that he became a writer of literature one day while sitting on a street corner at an outside table of a cafe. He saw that every person who passed by carried their bags differently. The woman hoisting her groceries on her hip, one hand jammed under the paper bag to keep the heavy groceries from tearing through and spilling everywhere, was suddenly distinct from the woman who strode by next with the her grocery sack folded over at the top like an oversized brown bag lunch. I've thought ever since that spending time developing that level of granular observation improves your writing. Details observed in the world will always be fresher than ones derived from other people's work.
That said, it's tiring to write 100% from observed details. Cliches and well-worn phrases form an easy shorthand for both reader and writer. I think poetry demands the skill more often with more consistency, but poetry is a brutal, compacted medium that asks a lot of everyone involved.
My current exercise is to stop using "looked" and "glanced" in my writing. I use pointing out the direction of the POV character's gaze as a crutch, and instead I want to imply the direction of their gaze by describing what they see. It's hard, and when I'm writing fic I don't bother with any of this at all because I generally don't care if my fanfiction is profound, I just want it to scratch a narrative itch and move along, but this is what I think about when I'm trying to improve my fiction.
