Hi Everyone! I’m so sorry that this post is late. I meant to have my first post up on Saturday. I literally forgot to write it in my planner. Anything that does not go in the planner doesn’t get done. I was literally chatting with my sister just before going to bed Saturday night and I mentioned something about Sunday and then froze remembering that it was Saturday (or the end of it) and I was supposed to update my blog. So, oops. I apologize for that. But here we are with my first post after returning. I’ve got a new series and new ideas to throw at you and hopefully we’ll get some new viewers soon. Yay! I’ve missed writing this blog! But without further ado…
Small Skills: The Power of Observation
So, I’ve decided that this new series is going to be about the small skills. These are the little things that you need to learn as a writer or learn to do but that most people don’t really talk a whole lot about. I’ve broken up the series into 3 different sections. Pre-writing, writing, and post-writing. This is the first part of the pre-writing series. There are 4 pre-writing posts, 4 writing posts, and 1 post-writing post. So, you’ll get a total of 9 posts from this series. Phew! That’s a lot of work!
But the first small skill that is really important to writing is Observation. This is something that I never gave enough credit to when I was a young writer. When I was first starting off at writing something that I really lacked was substance to my characters and to my scenes. This seems to be something that a lot of writers of today lack. Our books are made up of mostly dialogue with only cursory descriptions of a scene. This can be fixed by a lot of things, like writing techniques to comic books. But one thing that often gets shoved into the background of this solution is the power of observation. I feel that there are two parts to this power, and I think both are equally important to give your characters depth and your scenery and body language heft.
1. Turning Inward
The first piece of the power of observation is turning inwards. Your characters are real people. They feel real things. They have real thoughts and real emotions. These thoughts aren’t just supposed to be a series of sentences to help you reach your next plot device. These thoughts are conscious. They are what your characters actually think and so they should be as real as possible. But you can’t describe an emotion that you’ve never felt. Or at least an emotion you’ve never recognized that you’ve felt.
This is where turning inwards becomes an important part of the power of observation. The power of observation is the collecting of information from carefully observing something. In this case you are carefully observe yourself. Recognize the way you do things. Recognize little quirks that you have and then try to figure out why you do them. Observe your form of speech, your thoughts and your emotions. What causes them? Where did they come from? What did you do differently then the others around you to gain those unique ways of doing things?
Once you’ve observed yourself it becomes easier to transfer these things to characters. It’s easier to make your characters feel real. As you spend these moments observing yourself it also becomes easier to write these moments for your characters. Your reader can not read your characters mind anymore than they could read a normal person’s mind. Your character needs to be able to have these introspective moments where they realize that they are feeling something. A moment where they have a very clear or profound thought. A moment of deep thinking where the next plot twisting epiphany happens.
But a character, just like I discussed in one of my previous series, needs to have small quirks that make them, them. They need to have small things that they do to give themselves their own personality.
For example, I have a habit of picking the skin off of my first 3 fingers on each hand when I am bored or anxious. I had a few roommates who this would drive them nuts. They were constantly telling me to stop. They would try to slap my hand every time they caught me doing it. (Which, if we’re going to be honest, made me want to do it more because I’m stubborn like that.) One of these room mates later told me that she was reading a book where one of the characters had a whole 2 pages where she spent an agonizing amount of detail describing the habit that I had down to the T. She said it made her think of me.
Things like that are the small habits and the small things we need to observe. I constantly try to practice this skill. Several of my family members and room mates could tell you that it drives them crazy how sometimes I’ll stop in the middle of doing something and say, “Huh. Did you see that thing I just did? I do that a lot. I wonder why?”
This skill is very helpful. But its only one part of the power of observation.
2. Looking Outward
The second skill in the power of observation is looking outward. It’s a similar skill to looking inward but done in the opposite direction. Shocker, right?
But for real, turning outward is very important for the power of observation. If you’re only looking inward, then all your characters are going to be exactly like you (which I’ll talk about in a later post). If everyone was like you what a boring world we would live in right? No diversity? Boring. Without turning outward, we would also miss out on amazing descriptions, beautiful body language, and the funny unique things that other people do.
If you really want a unique character you need to give them unique things, so you need to also observe the unique things about others around you. Everyone’s different and so your characters should all be different. But the world is also a unique place. Different places have different kinds of beauty and something as simple as fire can be described in several different ways to express different feelings. Sometimes a person’s actions speak louder than words and describing a person’s body language means more than what they actually say. These are all skills that you can gain from turning outward.
This skill was always a little hard for me to work on. I’m more of an introvert. I find it easier to turn inward and ignore the outward world completely. But as I learned to observe the world around me it became easy and now I do it automatically in most situations. For me, just sitting around and observing stuff was too boring. I’m constantly working on something, either with my body or with my mind so sitting still and looking around was annoying. So, I came up with unique ways to keep myself observing.
While I was on car trips every 20 minutes, I would stop what I was doing to look out the window of my parent’s car and try to describe what I saw in 3 sentences or less. (Often these ended up being really awkward sounding run on sentences). When I was on campus, I would stop my homework every once in a while, and look around at the people around me, pick 5 of them, and try to make up a good story about them based on what they were doing, how they were standing and the tone of voice when they were speaking. Often these games didn’t take me more than a couple minutes, but they strengthened my observation skills.
Once you begin to work on this skill is becomes like when you exercise a muscle. The more you practice with it the more powerful it becomes. Often, I don’t have to play these games anymore because I observe what’s around me without even thinking about it. It also keeps me from getting lost. Haha. Landmarking things in parking lots or new places is so much easier and I can find my way around places a lot faster and more efficiently because I know how to observe the world around me. It keeps me out of bad situations because I can read people a little easier because I observe them more often. It’s also pretty entertaining people watching sometimes. One of my friends and I spent a whole hour out on her balcony in England watching people at the pub across the canal and trying to make up what their conversations were about.
All the little things you observe about people and the world around you make it so that you’re writing becomes more vivid. Its easier to describe things you see in your mind eye because you can see them more clearly. They often will start to look similar to things you’ve observed before as you begin to incorporate them into your mind.
Both turning inward and turning outward are important skills for honing your power of observation. I put this is the pre-writing section because before you can describe something you should observe it. But its really a skill that you should be using all the time not just before you write a particular book. If you think about it, its always before you write your next book so think of it as storing information for later. 😊
Thanks for reading another post, the first one in my new series. I hope that it was helpful but also entertaining. I try my best to make these informative and fun. It’s no fun to read something if it’s not entertaining at least a little bit. So, I hope that you have subscribe to the update emails, share this with a friend, or like it on Facebook. Feel free to send me a message through the contact me page with any ideas, thoughts, or complaints. I’m always willing to improve and learn. I hope you all gain success in your writing!
So, Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
Comments