by Mandy Jackson-Beverly
The definition of the word observe: to see, to watch, to perceive, and to notice. A couple of examples: I see a red light and stop my car, green light, I go, or, my husband and I watch a film together, and often we perceive the context quite differently.
Now imagine a different scene. I notice one of my students isn’t performing at her full potential. Her eyes are red, and her hand clutches a Kleenex that’s seen better days. Her shoulders are drooped, etc., etc. Here we’re observing physical characteristics. But just for a moment, put yourself in the girl’s mind; become her. How does she feel? Forget about the why of her predicament; instead push down into her body and consider how it feels to be sad. Perhaps you experience a need to escape, or feel constricted or withdrawn; these are emotional characteristics. Let’s change it up and say that it’s a young boy in the class, not a girl. Think for a moment how different that feels, and what the similarities are.
You can use different ways to observe and tease your readers. But how do we get there? As writers, it’s our job to dig deeper, to go beyond our peripheral vision and become that young girl or young boy in the classroom. Or better yet, hold our readers by the hand and allow them to become that little girl.
In Anne Lamott‘s book on writing, Bird by Bird, she uses the exquisite phrase “shitty first draft.” I’d like to add that in that shitty first draft, and, in fact, all of your drafts, forget about the word count! Listen to and connect with your characters and they will guide you. Your characters will tell you when they’re nearing the end of their story, and chances are this will not be when your word count reaches 80,000 or more. Your readers deserve more than word count. So ignore the social media forums and comments about word count and pushing to get multiple releases out every year. Instead, I suggest you follow your heart and write your story. Remember, we have editors (saints) to take away the pain of grammatical errors; our job is to write the story.
Every moment we spend staring through a car window, walking along a street or in a garden, or standing in a room, our brain is inundated with quick images. Roses bloom and die, their perfume lost in a wilted bloom. Sunsets settle behind the horizon while we prepare dinner or work in front of a computer monitor. The minutia of life drifts by us, and we often rely on a thesaurus to give us variations in our descriptive prose.
Imagine what our creative process would feel like if we were to close the books, switch off our computers, and walk around our neighborhoods with our mind open, capturing moments in real-time 3D images, using all of our senses while we observe every nuance. Sounds easy, but the reality is that we live in a culture bombarded with words and visuals.
In this fast-paced world of publishing, it takes discipline to slow down and capture the true essence of how our characters appear. Readers deserve more than a quick description of how a person looks. But how do we, the writers, get past the initial appearance of a character and start to peel away the layers of their persona? And how do we even begin to put these mannerisms and personality traits into words when we don’t know where and how to find them?
By using simple observational skills, our creative process deepens. For example, step away from your keyboard, pick up a pencil, and draw your hand, or look in a mirror and choose one facet of your face—eyes, nose, lips—draw the shape and then fill in the lines. This exercise is about observing, not perfection, and not about being an artist.
Consider a character’s hands. The apparent differences are male, female, age, and skin tone, but when we look deeper, we can see that the hands of a doctor look different from the hands of a gardener. Likewise, the fingernails of a flamenco guitarist are dissimilar to those of a pianist. In the world of fantasy, a character’s features are a writer’s dream come true. Having fun with the attributes of vampires, werewolves, and fairies or any other creatures requires thought and research, delving deeply into one’s imagination and pulling out the gold.
To write fiction, we must know everything about our character: diet, favorite color, background, religious or atheist, education, smell, favorite scent, height, weight, likes and dislikes, etc. If our readers want information verbatim, they can read a newspaper. As writers of fiction, it is our responsibility to grab our readers from the first paragraph and pull them into the world of our characters and their stories. And the first paragraph often depicts the surroundings or location. In essence, you’re painting the canvas with a mood.
Through the ritual of observation our senses detect the world around us in a multi-faceted manner, allowing us to open to the natural flow of our creativity, and therefore allowing our subconscious to begin its work before tossing ideas back to our conscious mind. At this point the ideas flow freely, and our writing deepens.
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Mandy Jackson-Beverly has taught Advanced Placement Art, written and directed high school theater productions, is a contributor to The Huffington Post, and a book reviewer for The New York Journal of Books. She resides in Ojai, California, with her husband, Brian Beverly, a cross-eyed cat, Luna, a dog named Cash, and sometimes her sons, Angus and Jack.