Notice What the World Has Stopped Seeing

People stop seeing what they see every day, and writers seem to be no exception; they tend to reach for the interesting, the dramatic, the already narrated. Suppose a writer describes a kitchen and gives the steam on the window and the smell of coffee, because every kitchen scene already has them. The page is accurate and could belong to anyone, competent in the language of what is already known and flat for that reason. In the authors’ view attention is the first creative act, since it determines what material a writer has at all, and what others overlook is probably unclaimed. The obvious has a whole vocabulary prepared for it. The overlooked has none yet, so describing it requires looking.

Joan Didion, in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” recalls interviewing a very rich woman in an orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard. On Didion’s arrival, the woman asked whether it was snowing outside. Didion’s notebook records the encounter, and she says the woman taught her a significant lesson about the very rich, one she adds she could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald. She never spells it out. It gives her no plot and no argument, only a small, odd fact, which she treats as holding a whole class of experience. A notebook, she says, is not an accurate factual record of what she was doing or thinking; how it felt to me is closer to the truth. In nonfiction, then, an observation is a starting point and not a proof, and a claim built on what one saw still has to be checked (see Practice 71).

Anton Chekhov’s advice on the subject is widely quoted, usually in a form he is not known to have written. The compressed form, don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass, is probably not Chekhov’s. Quote Investigator suggests it was built as a summary of a letter he wrote in May 1886 to his brother Alexander, who had literary ambitions. As Yarmolinsky renders the letter, Chekhov’s advice is to build a description of nature from a few small details, grouped so that a reader with closed eyes can see the scene. His example is a glint of broken bottle glass on a mill dam, like a small star, and the dark shape of a dog or wolf rolling past like a ball. He had already used almost the same images in a story published in March 1886.

The instruction is to seize and group, so the detail is selected and arranged, not merely logged; noticing without arranging gives an inventory. Chekhov may complicate it himself, since a technique for noticing, used as a formula, can stop the noticing. A decade later, in The Seagull, the same device turns up, assigned to the fashionable novelist Trigorin and described by the younger writer Treplev as a process Trigorin has worked out for himself, one that makes description easy. The scholar W. H. Bruford, in his 1957 study of Chekhov, reports that David Magarshack, Chekhov’s translator and biographer, took Chekhov’s intention in giving Trigorin the example as ironical.

Matsuo Bashō, in the frog poem usually dated to spring 1686, does with three items what a paragraph might do with thirty. In the authors’ plain rendering: old pond; a frog jumps in; the sound of water. The poem names its objects and explains nothing, and what it records is the sound, not the splash.

Practice. Pick a place you know so well you no longer see it: your kitchen, a commute, a corner. Spend twenty minutes there and record ten details that would normally escape description, each one sentence, free of judgment words such as beautiful or strange, and checkable by another observer. Circle the one that most surprised you and write three sentences about what it implies. Then stop.