Chapter 1- Seeing the World with a Writer’s Eye
Cultivating Curiosity and Wonder
More than a hundred years ago, Stephen Leacock, Canada’s beloved humorist, observed that “writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself — it is the occurring which is difficult.”
Some writers generate ideas the way sea horses produce eggs — hundreds upon hundreds, a scattershot approach, with most dying before they hatch. Other writers function more like orangutans, who produce offspring only once every six to eight years. These writers ruminate about their ideas, shielding and nurturing them, moulding them slowly into something fully formed.
Probably you fall somewhere between these two ends of the continuum, your exact location on the creativity scale fluctuating based on your circumstances. The same writer may think of more ideas or better ideas in one stage of life than in another, some seasons providing more of the energy and time required for the creative process. However, serious writers cultivate their creativity continuously, never waiting for the ideal slant of light to beam into their eye, or a mystical muse to dictate flawless sentences into their ear. Sure, some writers claim to experience an almost transcendental flow of ideas every now and then, but this is a rare event. Writers pursue creative thinking as a discipline, a habit, a way of life.
Seeing the world as a writer means cultivating a mind that actively reaches for ideas. This requires curiosity and wonder, with a good dose of objectivity. Writers observe closely and they reflect on what they notice.
Even as a writer engages with life — as they do the laundry, scoop the kitty litter, stand in line at the post office, listen to their co-worker rave or rant — part of their mind remains quietly observant. They note how people behave, how they themselves behave, how things look, feel, taste, smell, sound. They spot emotions; they attend to the way people — or they themselves — phrase thoughts. They perceive the gaps between what is said and what isn’t said, or between what is said and what’s meant. They ask questions — What’s happening? How is it happening? What is it like? What isn’t it like? Why this and not that? Why now and not then?
Turning on this reflective-observer part of one’s brain can render even the dull or fraught events in life more satisfying. An otherwise mind-numbing staff meeting may become the opportunity to make a list of the boss’s military metaphors: front lines, in the trenches, bite the bullet, losing the battle. You can collect the phrases to put in the mouth of your short story’s protagonist, enlivening the character’s speech and fleshing out the personality. You can attend your family reunion (replete with all its suppressed conflicts and your family members’ exasperating personality traits), and, instead of brooding about the disturbing DNA that spawned you, collect ideas. Whose mannerisms can you use for a character in your short story? What amalgam character can you create for your stageplay from your three eccentric cousins? Can you use the invasive and jarring questions from your uncle as a device to escalate conflict in your novel? Could you juxtapose the grand pastoral setting of the reunion with the simmering hostility to create a poem that comments on the gap between appearance and reality, or on the myopic perspective of humans compared to the epic scale of nature? For those who are looking, life offers a galaxy of writing material.
Along with keeping curiosity flowing during your day-to-day life, you can also seek out new experiences to inspire your writing. Meander through a neighbourhood you haven’t visited before or through your own neighbourhood at a time of day you’re not usually outside. Visit a quirky museum or a factory that gives public tours. Attend an event that’s outside your usual interests — an all-candidates’ debate, a public hearing, a protest, an auction, a race, a retreat, a religious service, a discussion group. Engage respectfully, but reflect as a writer, and use the material in real life to inspire characters, events, and themes for your writing. If your mobility is limited or your location is remote, talk radio, the news, YouTube videos, and documentaries can feed your writer’s sense of curiosity and wonder.
Finally, read broadly to gain ideas. When you read, you inspire your imagination. See more about this in the next chapter, “Reading as a Writer.”
Seeing the world with a writer’s eye means cultivating a sense of wonder. You need both the child’s sense of curiosity, discovery, and delight, and the adult’s ability to sift through what you perceive — to make sense of it, notice patterns, and see the possibilities in your observations.
Writing Your Ideas Down
Writers write. Perhaps this seems obvious, yet it needs to be said. Though you don’t hear people casually remark that they’ll compose a symphony or play pro hockey when they get around to it, many people claim that they are going to write a book in some vague future — next summer, or when their kids are older, or after they retire. “I’ve got a story in me,” they’ll say, or “I’m a poet at heart.” These people are daydreamers, not writers.
Having ideas doesn’t make you a writer. To be a writer, you need to write, translating your observations, experiences, thoughts, and feelings into sentences. This takes significant time and effort — books don’t just emerge one day, showing up like zucchini in a corner of the garden you’ve neglected. Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, Canada’s revered short story writer, wrote with what she called an almost compulsive commitment to writing, sitting down seven days a week and giving herself a quota of pages to produce. The initial drafts were chaotic: “I have stacks of notebooks that contain this terribly clumsy writing, which is just getting anything down.”
The polished stories that won worldwide attention emerged through labour and craft. Angie Abdou, who was a competitive swimmer before she became an author, says, “I come to writing as an athlete, and I’ve transferred the discipline, routine, and work ethic I used in swimming to writing … Ideas only arrive — and the story only comes to life — when I commit to daily time with the manuscript.”
In contrast to daydreamers who never get around to writing — and who don’t respect the work of writing enough — other would-be writers feel so intimidated by the process of writing their ideas down that they never start. At readings and author talks, these aspiring writers address published authors with veneration, even awe. Annie Dillard explains that perceiving a goal as unattainable stems from a false understanding of achievement: “We all want to believe that other people are natural wonders; it gets us off the hook.” Now, some of these published authors write as their full-time job, which means they devote much of their time and energy to writing. Many, however, (probably like you) earn their living some other way, and write in the cracks and corners they can find in their schedules. Some writers may be geniuses and prodigies, but most aren’t. They are ordinary people, but, while other ordinary people are binge-watching TV, scrolling through social media, hanging with friends, and engaging in a multitude of other pleasant pastimes, successful writers are writing. They are composing and revising their work. The difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write.
So, functioning in the world as a writer means not only observing the world with a writer’s eye but also sequestering yourself from that world to get the content that life has provided you down on paper or onto the screen. If you’re a writer, you must write.
The chapters ahead will show you how to generate the best ideas and how to go from idea to polished draft.