[Writerpreneur] Day 11 - Lesson 0203: Recovering the Author's Sight: Learning to See The World as New
You've always been looking around - now it's time to really observe to refuel your inspiration.
The professional writer keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world.
Many of us keep this responsiveness well into adolescence; very few mature men and women are fortunate enough to preserve it in their routine lives.
Those who see and feel and hear with every sense alert become rarer and rarer with the passage of years.
Too many of us allow ourselves to go about wrapped in our personal problems, walking blindly through our days with our attention all given to some petty matter of no particular importance.
This dullness of apprehension to which we all submit spinelessly is a real danger to a writer.
It is perfectly possible to strip yourself of your preoccupations, to refuse to allow yourself to go about wrapped in a cloak of oblivion day and night, although it is more difficult than one might think to learn to turn one's attention outward again after years of immersion in one's own problems.
For half an hour each day transport yourself back to the state of wide-eyed interest that was yours at the age of five.
Turn yourself into a stranger in your own streets.
You know how vividly you see a strange town or a strange country when you first enter it. The drugstore window, the car that carries you to work, the crowded subway, can look as strange as Xanadu if you refuse to take them for granted.
As you get into your taxi, or walk along a street, tell yourself that for fifteen minutes you will notice and tell yourself about every single thing that your eyes rest on.
Another time speculate on the person opposite you. What did she come from, and where is she going? What can you guess about her from her face, her attitude, her clothes? What, do you imagine, is her home like?
Try to see your home, your family, your friends, your school or office, with the same eyes that you use away from your own daily route.
No one cares to follow a dull and stodgy mind through innumerable pages, and a mind is so easily freshened.
Shortly after you begin looking about you like this you will see that your morning's pages are fuller and better than before.
It is not only that you are bringing new material to them 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, releasing for your use sensations and experiences, old delights, old sorrows, days that have been overlaid in your memory, episodes which you had quite forgotten.
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.
(from Dorothea Brande)