How Seeing = Ideas

Last week I talked about what it means to “see” for a writer, how most of us look at things everyone else sees and see something different.

I talked about the fact that I may not notice things everyone else does—like the color of a friend’s walls in their kitchen—but I notice other things no one else does. Going with that example, while I might miss the very obvious bright yellow of those kitchen walls, I do notice a broken piece of china under one of the kitchen cabinets. And the china is the same color as the plates that have been set on the dining table for dinner.

But then I go further. Instead of just picking the piece up and discreetly putting it in the trash, I think about how it got there. Was a plate just dropped by the husband or the wife? Did one of them chastise the other for dropping it? Is that why the husband and wife seem slightly testy with one another? Or was there an argument and one of them threw the plate at the other? Maybe that explains the testiness. And if there was a fight, what was it about? Is one of them having an affair? Is one of them ill and trying to distract the other from finding out by creating distractions like a fight over something inconsequential? Or did a burglar come into the house last night looking for something, break a plate, and miss this one piece in attempting a quick cleanup?

What do you notice about that last paragraph? It’s all questions.

Last week I asked you to look at something you see all the time and try and see it differently. What did you look at? Something in your house, your yard, your workplace? Something in your neighborhood? Whatever you looked at, wherever it was, start asking yourself a few questions about it.

What is the normal use for the object you saw? Then ask yourself what could be a different use? Or what could explain why it is where it is other than the most obvious explanation? For example, if you saw a shirt laying on the ground under a clothesline, the most obvious explanation for it being there is that it fell out of the laundry basket as the owner was taking laundry off the line. But your job as a writer is not to take the most obvious explanation, but to come up with something different. What could it be? Two lovers were running through the yard, looking for a clandestine spot, tearing off their clothes as they went! Or what? Come up with two more possible explanations for that shirt being there.

When you do that, when you come up with different explanations for something beyond the obvious explanation, you are generating ideas.

Ideas come from seeing something and then asking questions about it. And the weirder and more far out your answers to those questions, the better chance you have of coming up with an original idea that will add dimension to your story or might even be the impetus for the story itself.

Questions. So, how can you go about living your writing life so that you force yourself to do this more often, to see differently and then question the ‘why’ of what you see? Next week, we’ll explore one answer. Until then, keep seeing… differently.

Copyright © Diane Lake

07Jul19

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com