The Guinea Pig Report: The Innocent Eye
Becoming A Writer, Chapter Eleven: Learning To See Again
Brande begins this chapter with some words about habit and repetition, the “dullness of apprehension to which we all submit spinelessly” and how it feeds “the temptation to rework material … through thoughtlessness.” I would file this entire preamble under the heading laziness–laziness of eye and laziness of speech.
It’s a pretty harsh word, “laziness,” and I don’t wish to invoke its connotations of moral judgement on someone’s work ethic. Instead, I’m referring to what’s increasingly a survival tactic in today’s fast-paced, over-stimulated world. We learn mental shortcuts so as to process the vast amount of information coming at us from every direction–hundreds of cars alongside ours on the highway, the myriad emails and meetings and conference calls at work, all the news of the day and all the people we encounter in a week. We habitualize a sort of shallow triage on all this input, a kind of mental flowchart of categorized, stereotyped experience triggering a preset handful of reactions, just to stay functional. Our internal narrative becomes a series of IF/THEN blocks, telling ourselves about the world in only as much detail as is required to choose a course of action.
Nevertheless, a writer must relearn the trick of seeing everything on its own terms and speaking about it precisely.
For half an hour each day transport yourself back to the state of wide-eyed interest that was yours at the age of five. Even though you feel a little self-conscious about doing something so deliberately that was once as unnoticed as breathing, you will still find that you are able to gather stores of new material in a short time. Don’t plan to use the material at once, for you may get only the brittle, factual little items of the journalist if you do not wait for the unconscious mind to work its miracles of assimilation and accretion on them. But turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets.
—pp. 114-115
Take the time, she suggests, to really observe what you’re seeing. Not tree, but blue spruce or choke-cherry. Not man walking dog, but a skateboarding teenager being pulled along by an exuberant chocolate lab with a tennis ball in its mouth. A bus goes by: what route is it, and what advertisement is running on its side, and who is looking out the window?
Compared to the world Brande inhabited, ours has even more hurry-up-and-wait purgatories: lines at the bank, stop-and-go traffic, doctors’ waiting rooms, DMV lobbies. When you have nothing to do with your time but observe is the best time to practice observation. Accurate observation. Imaginative observation. Look at the family in the grocery line adjacent yours. Don’t just describe them to yourself factually in terms of their appearance and conversation and the items in their shopping cart. Create stories about them. Even as the check-out clerk is running up the half-dozen half-gallons of juice and the five bags of potato chips and saying, “Going to a picnic, huh?” you’ll be asking yourself, Who will be at that picnic? Where will it be held? Which child will spill her cup of grape juice all over a nearby hamburger, and how will that hamburger taste? And do you remember the last picnic you went to?
It is not only that you are bringing new material to [your morning’s pages] every day, but you are stirring the latent memories in your mind. Each fresh fact starts a train of associations reaching down into the depths of your nature….
This is one reason for the inexhaustible resources of the true genius. Everything that ever happened to him is his to use… 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.