Using Observation in Your Writing
Observation can be a wonderful way to spark ideas and bring resonant actions into your writing.
🍁 Say you need to show and not tell the reader that your protagonist is feeling guilty. Or anxious. Or cranky.
How do you pick up on these things from the people around you? What nonverbal signals do they send that communicate exactly what they’re feeling?
Maybe you know someone so well you can infer their mood from how they walk down the stairs in the morning. Maybe you know that you’ve misstepped when someone breaks eye contact and suddenly picks up a new task.
How many of these details are apparent only if you know someone really well? What if you were to (politely) observe strangers? What can you read just from their nonverbal signals?
Being aware of how you read emotion can help you furnish your prose with specific, telling details.
🍁 Say you have a scene with lots of dialogue or internal reflection but not a lot of action. These scenes can sometimes lack enough of a setting to make them feel grounded. Sometimes the scene feels like it has no momentum, simply because the characters are just talking and thinking. Adding physicality can help!
What can you observe about how people move as they talk? What gestures and tone of voice accompany turns in the conversation/mood? Does someone grow still and focus on a faraway point, each word coming halting and careful, as they reveal thoughts they haven’t put into words before?
🍁 You can also observe your own actions. If you have a lot on your mind, what activities help you process? Cleaning the house? Gardening? Running until you can’t run anymore? How do you feel at the beginning vs. the end? Why did it help?
🍂 Including physicality in your scenes is an incredibly useful tool to:
-Reveal how a character is feeling
-Break up long chunks of dialogue
-Ground a scene in setting
-Bring a sense of action to internal thought progressions
🍂 An excellent way to build an observation bank is to jot down notes of what you notice others DOING. That way, when you need a character action, you won’t reach for words you’ve read before (as we all tend to do).
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