I drove through a storm today, and the lightning brought me a gift.
It was unlike any storm I have ever driven in. The afternoon was overcast when I set out, bound for a little Café in a neighboring city. But halfway through the 20-minute drive, that muted blue gave way to darkness and thunder.
The sky opened. Rain fell in such thickness that it felt more like I was piloting Nemo’s Nautilus than driving a clunky sedan. Water flowed in sudden rivers on either side of the highway, and the wind blew it in beating sheets against the windows, sounding like the pounding of desperate hands.
But it was the lightning that held my attention. Close, bright, and lovely-soft through the haze of falling water, it struck and struck again, leaving white lances to flash before my eyes whenever I blinked. Thunder shook the deepest recesses of my chest.
It was frightening. But I wasn’t frightened. In fact, I smiled.
I smiled because the lightning brought me the gift of wonder.
I’ve fallen into one of the worst traps a writer can stumble into, of late. I’ve become numb to experience. It’s a scientific fact that time really does pass us by more quickly as we age. This happens because our minds skip over that which we’ve already experienced. It’s our brains’ way of letting us focus on other things, rather than constantly marveling at everything around us, as if seeing it for the first time.
As a result, life seems to go by faster and faster with accumulated experience. In essence, we grow numb to life over time.
But the lightning spoke to me. I’ve seen lightning many times, as I love to watch it. But this lightning, close, loud, and irresistibly present, commanded me to not merely watch, but to notice. And so I did. I noticed as it branched, illuminating cloud and raindrop. I noticed its off-white color. I noticed the sound it made by rapidly expanding the air around it, and I marveled that it was hot enough to do so.
The storm continued as I slowly drove, and I was forced to park in a safe area for a time until the waters receded from the streets. But something curious had happened to me.
I began noticing everything. Because the lightning simultaneously forced me to slow down, and reminded me of the wonder it held, I began to consider the other everyday wonders I’ve been missing in my numbness. I watched a bird alight on the neon sign of a ramen restaurant. I noticed the way an older man held his hands as he stepped outside his shop to observe the storm. I looked at my own hands, flexing the fingers that I alone could control. It was exhilarating—an entire world to notice, to love and experience.
Maintaining open eyes to wonder requires two things of us: the daily, conscious decision to do so, and the willingness to put aside the shame many of us feel at simply marveling. It makes us feel vulnerable. Childish. We fear mockery if we look at the world with open eyes, because we’ve been taught to mistake these open eyes for naiveté or stupidity. Likewise, we mistake cynicism and pessimism for the height of intellect and realism.
But if you want to be a good—no, a great—writer, you must have open eyes. You must wake up. Set aside your shame and stop living on autopilot. Get out of the back seat of your life and start actively noticing the world in its entirety.
You can begin doing this by purposefully noticing in layers. Take a bird, for example. The first layer of noticing a bird is simply seeing it and abstractly thinking “bird.” But go one layer deeper, and consciously realize that this bird is here. It has its own life and set of experiences, apart from you.
Go down another layer, and notice its features—it has curious little feet, and each toe is tipped in a tiny claw. Its beak is dark and curved. You don’t have a beak, but it does. So strange. And it can fly. What must it be like to fly?
Keep delving through the layers, and you’ll soon knock the dust from your sense of wonder. You can do this with anything at all—a patch of light on the street, a drop of water flowing down a window pane, a death, a first kiss. Anything.
This isn’t just good for your writing. It’s good for you. I know that I sometimes take my significant other for granted, despite the fact that I love her more than anything. This happens to many of us; the numbness of familiarity creeps up in subtle ways. But tonight, the lightning has re-illuminated my thoughts of her, and although she is currently away, I am consciously noticing. The thousand, thousand tiny things that make her radiantly beautiful will no longer simply pass me by. I see her.
She is wondrous.
As a writer, you must remember wonder. The act of noticing, and of translating that noticing to the page is one of the core principals of effective, beautiful writing. When you tell a story, you write down a series of events that has, essentially, already been told in a thousand different ways. There are thousands of books about war, and even more about people falling in love, but how do you make your wars, and your loves stand out?
You do this by infusing wonder into every scene. Make your readers see the bird landing on the sign as if for the first time. Have them gape at a man’s hands, at their complexity, at the uniqueness and innate strangeness of them. Make them hear the rain and feel the thunder anew. Bring yourself to consciously notice, my fellow writers, and translate exactly what you see onto the page for your readers.
Bring them the lightning, and they will love you for it.
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