Awareness

Creating a novel – or anything, really – is like taking a trip around the world; no matter how much preparation you’ve done or how carefully you’ve planned things, the places you visit will be strange and surprising. Things will happen that you didn’t anticipate – some good, some not. The trip will take longer than you expected, it will be over much sooner than you want it to be; you will miss seeing some of the things you were certain you would see and you will see incredible things that you hadn’t planned on.

Also, there’s no real endpoint. If you keep going long enough, you eventually find yourself back where you started, only the place you’ve arrived is different from the place you left. Furthermore, you can repeat this cycle endlessly, either attempting to recreate what you did the first time (it won’t work; even if you visit exactly the same places on the same timetable, they will be different from your memories of them) or setting off in a slightly different direction that you follow to stranger and newer places, until you once again follow the great circle back to your point of origin. Which will have changed again by the time you get back to it.

It’s not so much the places that change as it is one’s ability to see them. People tend to pay more attention to the things around them a) when they’re seeing things that are new and strange and unfamiliar (humans have a built-in cognitive bias toward novelty), b) when they’ve been anticipating seeing/experiencing these things eagerly for a while, and c) when they’ve just paid a huge pile of money for their trip of a lifetime. After a couple of weeks or months of practice at looking at things, it becomes enough of a habit that one continues to apply it when one arrives home, at least until it wears off and one settles back into one’s normal life of not looking.

We all tend to be most aware of whatever we’re focused on, frequently to the exclusion of all else. There’s a famous video that illustrates this, but most people can think of examples from everyday life as well. If I go into the living room to look for my size 4 knitting needles, I probably won’t notice whether I can hear the radio that I left on in the back room, and I’m quite likely to be back in five minutes, looking for my glasses or my tea mug, even though I just walked past them five or six times while hunting for my needles. I wasn’t paying attention to sounds or to things I might need other than knitting needles, so those didn’t register. If, however, I want to know what I can hear in the living room, I’ll notice the radio, the swish of the furnace fan, and the trucks rumbling by two blocks away, because I’m focused on sounds (I still won’t notice the glasses or the tea mug, though).

Nobody can be aware of everything all the time. One can, however, change one’s focus from time to time to become aware of things that don’t usually register – everything from the way your feet feel when you walk through a puddle while wearing running shoes to how many people in the cafe are wearing glasses or are left-handed. It’s especially useful to stop occasionally and check some of the non-visual senses – the smells and sounds and sensations of various places or actions that we normally only notice if something is wrong or unexpected, such as when the sound is a police siren or the smell is the scent of lilies in midwinter. It also helps to have a good memory (or a notebook constantly to hand, along with the habit of jotting down places, times, phenomena, and one’s reactions).

Cultivating this kind of conscious awareness is, at the very least, enormously useful to any writer, for two reasons: first, because your viewpoint characters will notice things according to their own focus, which is usually not quite the same as the writer’s (the optometrist character is likely to automatically register which people have glasses and which ones are squinting, while ignoring the mixed bouquet that the gardener spots right off the bat), and second, because the places your characters go are full of sights, sounds, smells, and sensations. If you can’t see/feel/smell/hear it – if you never bothered to notice it – you can’t get it onto the page … and depending on what “it” is that you’re overlooking, not getting it on the page can make the writer’s story less realistic, less believable … just less. Even if it’s a surreal nonlinear tale about intelligent time-traveling dinosaurs.