For dancers, it’s the steps. For athletes, the stretching and strengthening. For singers, the breathing.
And for writers, it’s observation. Before the stories. Before the scenes. Before the carefully wrought sentences. Before the single written word. The starting point of everything we do is the act of observing.
When I talk to writers about the importance of observation, they often describe some of the unusual things they’ve recently seen. One told me she’d been spending her afternoons in a courtroom, something she felt would come in handy as she wrote the crime drama she was planning. Some time ago, another writer said he’d just watched a film showing open heart surgery as part of his preparation for writing a medical suspense novel. These writers, like many others, think of observation as something you do to learn about activities, events, and settings you don’t know much about. You can’t write about salmon fishing, they believe, if you’ve never been on a salmon boat.
I’m not going to dispute the importance of this kind of observation. I once looked at dozens of photos of people with facial deformities for a short story I was writing—I know how necessary that kind of research can be. But there’s another type of observation that is more basic—and more essential to the writer’s craft. It’s the observation not of things we’ve never seen before, but of things we see every day. It’s the simple act of looking with open eyes at the familiar, the ordinary, the everyday.
The best essay I ever read about this kind of observation was written by entomologist Samuel Scudder, who once studied with the famed Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz. The first day Scudder worked under the professor, Agassiz gave him a preserved fish. His task: Observe it. Scudder sat watching the lifeless animal for awhile, then reported to his teacher. When he told Agassiz what he had observed, the zoologist was unimpressed. He sent the dismayed Scudder back. Scudder observed the fish again, and again reported back to Agassiz. The zoologist was still not satisfied. This happened many times. Hours passed. Then days. Scudder stared at the fish and stared some more, but he couldn’t seem to come back with the right observation for Agassiz. Finally, it dawned on him. He hurried back to the professor’s office and reported his findings: the fish had two symmetrical sides. Agassiz was pleased.
The thing is, this symmetry is the most distinct, most evident, most essential quality of the physical construction of a fish. So why did it take Scudder so long to identify it—to even notice it? Because, like all of us, he’d seen hundreds of fish in his life.
The most difficult thing to observe is the ordinary. Our brains—stimulated by change and dulled by the familiar—gloss over things when we know them too well. When we first paint our walls a new color, we notice it every day. Then we forget about it. When we hear a new song, we are excited and alert. Then we become bored. When a child first sees a fish, she or he stares in fascination at the strange, limbless creature. The child notices right away the two matching sides, each with an eye, a gill, identically placed fins. Then the child stops noticing.
This cessation of noticing—this shutting down of our attentiveness—does not serve writers well. If we are going to be the witnesses to the human experience, we must keep seeing the world around us as if we’d never seen it before. We have to be attuned to the mundane details. We have to observe—and not just things we’ve seldom seen (courtrooms, surgery, facial deformities), but the things we’ve seen a thousand times.
I sometimes have my students observe a rock. A plain, everyday stone. “It’s gray,” they say at the beginning. “It’s oval. It’s hard.” I make them keep looking. Not for a minute or two or five, but for twenty or thirty or more. Beyond boredom. Beyond frustration. Beyond the point where they start wondering if it’s too late to drop my class. And, at last, the rock opens up to them. Suddenly, they say, “It’s not just oval: It’s the shape of an eye. It’s flecked with pink and green, with a background that isn’t just gray but is every shade of gray, from pale ash to the deepest charcoal. There is a tiny fissure on one side in the shape of a crow.” They are always amazed.
This is the power of observation—of true, deep watching. It draws our attention to things we no longer notice. It reminds us of the miracle of the everyday. It shows us the complexity of a simple gray stone.