Improve your writing skills without actually writing
It’s the holiday season, so it might be harder than usual to find time to sit at your computer as you normally would and write for however long you usually do. It can be difficult to keep a routine when holiday chaos sets in.
But there are things you can do to enhance your writing skills without actually writing.
For instance, you can move into an observation mindset as you go about celebrating and mingling and taking time off from work. It’s a good time to hone your observation skills because you are out of your routine, visiting different places, seeing different people, doing different things.
There’s an old writing craft book that I really enjoy titled, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (printed in 1934). As I browsed this book recently, I notice how Brande’s voice leaps from the page, how I feel as if she’s right here beside me sharing her words of advice. Those words are both practical and charming, her advice both inspirational and completely doable. She believes everyone can write and that it’s all about finding the “writer’s magic.”
It occurred to me, as I browsed, that Learning to See Again (chapter 11) is something one can do while on a brief vacation from writing (or a truncated writing routine). Read on to learn how you can mindfully improve your skills while decking the halls and ringing in the new year.
FIRST, THE PROBLEM
The blinders of habit. “Too many of us allow ourselves to go about wrapped in our personal problems, walking blindly through our days with our attention all given to some petty matter of no particular importance.”
This is what Brande said of her fellow writers back in the 1930s. Imagine how she’d feel about cell phones and our need to check Instagram every five minutes. I think there are people out there who literally never look up from their phones, and that can’t be good if they’re writers.
She says this preoccupation with the self is a real danger. We all know that good writing is infused with the details of the senses, and if we’re not observing, experiencing, touching, smelling, and listening in our own lives, the work will suffer.
THE SOLUTION
Recapturing Innocence of Eye. “Merely deciding that you will not be oblivious is hardly enough,” Brande says.
Instead, she suggests practicing the art of seeing the world through different, younger, more eager and amused eyes in an effort to become fascinated with the everyday world that you see all that time but usually don’t take note of.
Her advice is to dedicate one half hour a day to “transport[ing] yourself back to a state of wide-eye interest that was yours at the age of five.”
In other words, explore the world around you as if everything you see is new. Closely examine the gadgets in your kitchen. Go into your backyard and notice that evergreen tree and the tiny pinecones it has sprouted in the cold weather. Then pick one of those cones and examine the way it harbors little seeds within its many prickly petals.
The idea is to “turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets.”
A Stranger in the Streets. Consider how vividly you see a strange town or a strange country when you first enter it, Brande suggests. This is how clearly you want to see the environment you live in. Then she says, as you get into your car, or walk along a street, “tell yourself that for fifteen minutes you will notice and tell yourself about every single thing that your eyes rest on.”
This is how you can jump-start your skills of observation. For instance, if you’re looking at your car, what color is it? Don’t answer with a simple “white” but get very specific: moonlight white or chalk white or mushroom white. If you’re seated on a train or plane, notice who you’re seated across from. What are they wearing, what do they carry with them? What sounds do you hear while you travel? What conversations?
Approach every new scene with a purposely “intense awareness” of this sort. It doesn’t even have to be a place that’s new to you. You can observe the office space you work in every day.
“Any moment of your life can be used,” Brande says. “And the room that you spend most of your waking hours in is as good, or better, to practice responsiveness on as a new street.”
That means you can do this exercise any time, any place. If you do it once a day, just think of all the useful details you’ll have in store the next time you write a scene.
In order for this to work, however, you must adhere to one rule: be sure to put what you notice into “definite words” before you move on to another scene. That is the key.
The Rewards of Virtue.
Says Brande, “Shortly after you begin looking about you like this, you will see that your morning’s pages are fuller and better than before.”
Not only will you bring new material to your work, but Brande says this new power of observation will stir up latent memories that you can use in your writing as well. The idea is that each fact that you consider acts like a catalyst of sorts that creates a straight line to other sensations and experiences you’ve stored in your memory, things you may have forgotten but now remember. in this way, you can access a whole inexhaustible host of material, every piece which potentially can be used in your writing.
Says Brande, “By the simple means of refusing to let yourself fall into indifference and boredom, you can reach and revive for your writing every aspect of your life.”
For other simple yet profound ways to become a writer, I recommend reading Brande’s entire book. You might even have time to do it over the holiday break.
Kim Catanzarite is a writer, editor, and instructor for Writer’s Digest University. Her sci-fi thriller, They Will Be Coming for Us, published June of this year to strong positive reviews. She is currently masterminding her next book promotion.
