Originality may be the most overrated of the writerly virtues. Much more important is the skill of seeing what’s in front of you and rendering it faithfully. The world is a varied place; every person in it is a miracle; every setting is unusual; every event, every encounter is a thing that has never happened in the long history of the world. On top of all that variety is the fact that every observer’s vision is unique. If you will allow yourself to see what you see, and then write what you have seen, you can be sure that originality will take care of itself.
That’s not an easy thing to do. Few people write what they have seen. More often, they write what they think they ought to have seen, or they shoehorn experiences and people into familiar categories. It’s a hard habit to break; categorizing and sorting the firehose-blast of experiences and ideas that come our way is a necessary survival skill. But writing is different. Writing is a chance to release experience from man-made categories and say, “Look at this—this thing that exists in the real world.” Writing comes alive when you do that. Oddly enough, faithful imitation is the front door to originality.
I gave a version of this speech to a creative writing class last week. Before I was even finished, one of my students raised her hand. “That’s fine,” she said, “but I went to a high school where everybody actually did fit the stereotypes. There were the jocks, the nerdy kids, the farm boys, the Goth kids . . .” I told her I found it hard to believe that her schoolmates, taken one at a time, fit those stereotypes any better than she did herself. But she was insistent. “The whole town,” she said, “it was like any other stereotypical farm town in Montana.”
I challenged her on that one too. “Tell us about your town,” I said. “Help us understand what’s so stereotypical about it.”
“Think about any farm town,” she said. “Everybody drives around in muddy farm trucks.” We nodded. That did sound maybe a little bit stereotypical. “And at Christmas, everybody goes to the grocery store to drink apple cider and sing Christmas carols.”
“You do what at Christmas?” somebody asked.
“We go to the grocery store to drink apple cider and sing Christmas carols. Like any other small town.” She was astonished to learn that nobody in the room (except for a classmate who happened to be from a town fifteen miles away from her) had ever heard of such a thing. It soon came out that those stereotypical classmates of hers often rode horses to school, and that her stereotypical principal took care of the horses during the school day.
All that to say, there is no such thing as a stereotypical high school or small town or farmer or principal. No stereotype or category can stand against the concrete reality of specific details. This young woman thought she lived in a stereotypical town when in fact she lived in a town where the locals gather at the grocery store to sing Christmas carols, where the high school principal doubles as an hostler.
Writing what you see means, among other things, paying attention to the detail that you couldn’t have known about if you hadn’t been there. I’ve got some ideas about what life in small-town Montana is like, but I wouldn’t have guessed the grocery store hymn sing or the high school horse corrals.
In one of my online writing classes, a Floridian wrote about the morning she woke up to see snow in her yard—the only time she had seen snow in her life. It wasn’t a bad piece of writing. All the sentences were good, each paragraph hung together, there were some good similes and metaphors to liven things up. But something was missing, and it took me a minute to put my finger on it. The problem was this: her story read exactly like it would have read if you or I had written a story about a little girl in Florida who sees snow for the first time. Everything you would expect was there, from her looking out the window and not believing her eyes, to the annoying little brother hitting her in the back of the head with a snowball, then smirking and ducking behind a tree. But I find it impossible to believe that nothing happened on that day that I couldn’t have predicted. I can’t even predict what’s going to happen in Florida on a regular day—but a snow day?
A week or two later, the same writer wrote a piece about watching a lizard shed its skin. She simply told what she saw, and the result was mesmerizing: “Twisting his head as far right as it would go, he grabbed a piece of his skin and pulled it away. It tore with a sound like tissue paper. His jaw moved up and down as he chewed and swallowed. Then he turned his head left, pulled off another section of skin, and swallowed it.” A couple of paragraphs later, the lizard startles and dashes away: “He leaped off the ledge of the porch and into the garden below. A few pieces of skin flew off as he did, but the rest of it stayed on his back as he disappeared into the grass.”
That writing is fresh, vivid, sensory. It invites me to experience something I’ve never experienced before. It had never occurred to me that a lizard pulling off his old skin would make a sound like tissue paper. The flakes of skin flying off as the lizard jumps from the porch—who would have guessed that? And yet it makes perfect sense: of course that’s what would happen. But you would only know it if you had been there.
That description of the lizard strikes me as highly original. But that originality doesn’t derive from a flight of fancy, or an exercise of imagination. It came from a writer paying attention to the world around her and telling us what she saw.
Jonathan Rogers is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, one of the finest biographies of Flannery O’Connor we've ever read. His other books include the Wilderking Trilogy–The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking–as well as The World According to Narnia and a biography of Saint Patrick. He has spent most of his adult life in Nashville, Tennessee, where he and his wife Lou Alice are raising a houseful of robustious children.
18 Comments
Rob Collins
Jonathan,
There is something spiritual about this idea, perhaps even theological. Maybe the truth is there is something spiritual about writing. “Seeing what you see” is a powerful challenge for any writer. I think that I will take this as my challenge for today, for the entire day. I will try to see everything that I see.
Looking forward to Hutchmoot.
Rob Collins
Jeff Miller
Cool post.
To me, just “paying attention to the world” around you can be one of the purest forms of worship. If you can write about it (and a lot of people here can, and do! Myself – not so much ; ), then that’s taking that worship even a step further.
God has created, and continues to create, an amazing world we live in.
JM
Chris Yokel
Great piece Jonathan. I’m going to share this piece with my writing students.
Loren Warnemuende
I’ve been trying to be more intentional about seeing here in Guadalajara. In some ways there is so much that’s different that it’s easy to notice the details, but my tendency is to categorize them and catalog them so they have meaning (in my mind). I’m going to have to focus more on just seeing. I might be surprised with the results. Thanks for the exhortation.
Dawn
This is what I’m trying to be better at in Chicago!
Aaron
I love this. Thank-you.
Leanne
This is what I love about Kate DiCamillo’s writing. In my opinion, she is brilliant at attending to what she sees and sharing it with the world.
Matthew
This all makes sense. The topic itself teaches the meaning because we all meditate on one thing or another in life, we just don’t stop to realize what we are doing. When you focus on a bible passage, soaking up the surrounding context, you are seeing it with a new light, with new originality. When you take time to befriend the “class nerd” and find out how they think and that the things they do that irritate people is actually what makes them unique, you are finding the originality that God put there. Now that Jonathon has taken the time to show us that originality isn’t what you make of something, but what you observe and learn from something, then all our past comes into focus and our future holds a new beginning. May God help us to see in this light more often.
Mark Geil
“Writing what you see means, among other things, paying attention to the detail that you couldn’t have known about if you hadn’t been there.”
This is such excellent advice. I find myself reading authors who are so good at metaphor that I spend my time chasing the perfect literary device, when it might be better just to do a really good job describing what I see so someone else can be there too.
Lisa
A good reminder that the skill we seek isn’t necessarily in the writing, but in the seeing. To see means to slow down, to take time; dare I say, to meditate. It reminds me of the first line of Trees, by Joyce Kilmer :
I think that I shall never see
a poem as lovely as a tree.
Peter B
Fascinating. I long for this.
Dave Bruno
Love this Jonathan. So here’s a question for discussion: How does one go about doing this when writing about a fantasy world?
Matthew
Ooo, pick me Dave. If you think about your favorite fantasy stories they are the ones that not only open your eyes to a new world, but the people, things, and ideas in that world. My favorite fantasy right now is Aurelia’s Colors because Jeffery puts so much thought and observation into his characters that the fantasy ends up being a picture of real life in disguise. Lord of the Rings is a favorite because characters are the focus behind all the battles and expanse of Middle Earth. Harry Potter spends so much time focusing on the every day of life that you become part of that world. So in the end fantasy is just a mask of your own experience in this very real life. Singer/song writer Judy Rogers once told me (and a crowd behind me) that the difference between a writer and someone who wants to be one is living life. We carry over what we learn into our writing. What you observe in this life gives you insight even into the fantasy realm.
Yankee Gospel Girl
Much like Annie Dillard describing the bugs behind her toilet. Only Annie Dillard could make something like that read interestingly!
Wendy Lane
Ah! Thank you. This is so inspiring to my own writing endeavors. I’m also going to share this with my daughter at the beginning of our next weekly writing and tea time.
What a helpful way to set our creative course before we begin!
Jennifer K.
This quote rang in my head (well, actually pieces of it) at reading your first sentence: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
I’ve read that Lewis quote many times and somehow forget all about it when I take pen in hand and try to be a writer. Thanks for reminding me that all I need to be is a witness to all the wonder around me.
layla bb solms
to be a witness to all the wonder that is around me…. that is music to my ears…. and reminds me of Anne Frank’s encouragement… “think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy” i don’t want to take her words out of context; yet even in the midst of trials and despair in the world around us, God is still the author and creator of all & we must notice, appreciate, and share that with those around us.
Yankee Gospel Girl
And yet Middle Earth is really England, if you think about it. Tolkien was still writing what he knew even when creating another world.
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