Authenticity Week Day Five: Seeing
Added 2024-10-18 12:03:39 +0000 UTCWhen I was a little girl, my grandmother pointed at a wall and asked me what colour it was. I was a smart seven-year-old, so I naturally said white. She was an artist, though, and she’d spent a lifetime looking at the world as it really is. She pointed to the greys and blues in the shadows. She pointed to the smudged ochre dirt and the pewter in the cracks. She said I wouldn’t find a single stitch of white on that wall, even though it was coated in ivory paint.
Writers must engage in the same observational exercise. The better you see the world around you, the more authentic your writing will become. White walls rarely exist. There’s no true black in nature. Jeans tear white, not blue. Coins rarely glimmer, and smiles aren’t usually toothpaste white, but if you read a cheap romance novel, it will include precisely these faux details. If you want to become better, you have to see better. You have to truly look and listen.
The human brain helps us to survive by creating shortcuts in our memories. We’re prone to finding patterns where there are none. That gives us the evolutionary advantage. It keeps us alive, so as writers, we’ve got to challenge our own perceptions constantly. A writer friend takes a sketchpad with him wherever he goes. He never does anything with the drawings. They’re his way of tricking himself into seeing the world as it really is. I highly recommend the habit.
If you want to write, you must learn to see. It’s one of the most powerful writing skills you’ll ever learn.
