Plagiarism Week Day Two: Look. Really Look.

I wasn’t always a writer. Before I found poetry, I made visual art. To evolve, I had to learn to look at what was there, not what I thought was there. If I didn’t look properly, my art would fail. I learned the world is infinitely more complex than I’d imagined, and that’s how I learned to create realistic images. We must use the same discipline to plagiarise our own lives. We must look at what is really there, not what we think is there.

You don’t always see what you think you see. The brain is easy to trick, and when we look at something, we’re interpreting it according to our memory of that object, and not the object itself. Our brains create shortcuts to use our memory space judiciously, so to write well, you must overcome those shortcuts. You must look at what is really there, not the shortcut your brain created to simplify the world around you.

One of my favourite writing exercises is walking with a camera. I take pictures of small details I usually don’t notice. I don’t look at the photos much. They aren’t the point. The exercise helps me to get into an attitude of observation. It centres me and allows me to pay conscious attention. This is the most important space you’ll ever enter as a writer, so I love mindfulness as a writing tool. We covered it in our first week in the workshop, and we’re covering it again today. Mindfulness is all about becoming fully immersed in the present moment. It sharpens the world for us and frees our minds to really pay attention to what’s around us.

Hopefully you managed to achieve a degree of mindful observation yesterday. Choose a moment, object, or human you observed and create an authentic image of it using words. This is not a full story, only a description. You can make it a poem if you like. You’re quite welcome to write prose as well. Choose whatever feels right. Your subject matter can be anything that made an impression on you, whether it’s a feeling, object, landscape, or event.