teaching

What word of advice do you have for aspiring writers?

I get this question all the time—or if not all the time, often enough. I suspect all writers do. My first word is always the same: Pay attention.

Why? You can’t improve on God. It’s his world and his personality reflected in the near-infinite variety of animal and plant life, weather, terrain, sea, sky, and especially humanity. Even if you write the most far-out fantasy, your creation can’t come close to his for depth and color. That’s great news—think of all the material you have to work with!

That story you’re plotting in the Nebula cloud will be peopled with human-like personalities, even if they don’t look human at all. Without personality, there’s no story. And personality, along with all the other wonders of creation, is fully accessible to the aspiring writer who is trained in observation skills. Some suggestions:

1. Keep a notebook, or notecards. I favor notecards because they fit easily in a purse or pocket and can be sorted and filed later. The idea, of course, is not that you carry it (or them) around to feel like a writer, but that you actually write your observations.
2. Watch the weather. Note sky colors, cloud formations, the feel and smell of the air. Have you noticed the outside air smells different in different seasons? Spend some time outside at a particular time of day, or during a snowfall or 100-degree afternoon, feeling and smelling and writing down your impressions. Watch out for lightning.
3. Note unusual faces, postures, mannerisms. I’ve noticed people in passing and thought, That’s how So-and-so looks! (So-and-so being a character in a novel I’m working on). You might not have time to whip out your notebook and write a lightning description, but keep a few details in mind and jot them down later.
4. Listen to conversations. The food court at the local mall was once an ideal spot for listening unobserved. If the nearest conversation wasn’t very interesting, you could pick up your Kung Pao Chicken and Coke and take it to another table without attracting much notice. I don’t know how crowded food courts are now, but there are other possibilities: outdoor restaurants, airports, church, hospital waiting rooms. Unobserved listening isn’t about being nosy; it’s about broadening your knowledge of how people actually talk (as opposed to the stilted expository dialogue amateur writers tend to use) and what they talk about. Sometimes even what they think.
5. Start a conversation. Writers are often solitary, introspective individuals who prefer lurking to engaging. Fortunately for us, plenty of people out there like to talk. A simple question in the checkout line, like, “Having a picnic?” (to a cart piled high with sandwich bread) or, “What are you going to do with all those avocados?” could at least get you some good recipe ideas. Even better, it might get you some good stories. A conversation I had with a young man in a pickup truck, way out in western Kansas, ended up almost verbatim in my novel, The Middle of Somewhere. I’ll always regret not following up with a woman at the local grocery who told me she had a fatal disease. That conversation could have had far greater consequence than fictional embellishment.

Before I ever published a novel, I corresponded with an author who quoted the old saying, “All is grist to the writer’s mill.” (At least, she said it was an old saying; at the time I wasn’t old enough to have heard it.) Meaning, there’s a world of material out there, so don’t spend all your time dialoguing with yourself.

You can’t improve on God. That’s my old saying.