Where Writers Learn

When you practice using your powers of observation, you make that faculty stronger. In the process, you also collect a lot of material that you can use in pieces of writing. As you gather your material, and live with it for a while, you will find your own ways of using it. (Don’t forget, though, that you don’t have to use it, if you don’t want to; the most important value of the practice of observation is to strengthen that faculty.) Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:  Read More 

You can do the basic practice of observation any time as you move through your life; you don’t have to write down what you notice. But after a while you will probably find yourself noticing things that you want to write down. Now you can engage in observation practice not just to strengthen your powers of observation but also to collect material for pieces of writing. The collecting you did in earlier lessons was what I call internal collecting —you collected material from inside yourself. When you collect material through observation, you are engaging in external collecting—collecting material from outside yourself. (You can do external collecting in other ways as well; you can find more details in How To Be a Writer.) Read More 

The imagination is the mental faculty that enables us to make pictures of things that aren’t present to our senses. But in order to make those pictures, we need to have already filled our imaginations with raw material. How do we do that? By making use of another essential writer’s faculty: our power of observation. The imagination is completely dependent upon observation; so, if we want to be able to use our imagination in our writing, we need first to develop our ability to observe.  Read More