LEARNING TO SEE

By Sarah C. Campbell

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.- John Ruskin

We writers need details to make our stories come alive - whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction. We rely on our senses to collect these pieces of information.

But, have we trained them to find the most vivid, or truest, details possible? And, are we failing to "see" some unexpected things because the brain tends to shape sensory content to conform to its prior experiences and learned expectations?

My own failure to see something interesting about some snails that turned up in my back yard taught me something about my own shortcomings as an observer.

My son found the snails and decided to adopt them. After consulting with me, he tore leaves from plants growing nearby to feed them. We watched as the snails slid across the tender leaves; the agitating motion of their feet appearing to rip the leaves into bite-sized pieces; they were eating. After all, snails eat leaves, right?

Wrong. After his first pet snails died, my son and I took the next one we found to an expert at the local science museum. He asked what we had been feeding it. "Leaves," I said. Well, our snails were a rare species of predatory land snail. They were hunting for other snails or slugs. I so expected to see the snails eating the leaves that I failed to consider other possibilities. Fortunately, we writers can improve our observational skills.

I recently learned some useful techniques from Mark Baldwin, education director for the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, during a workshop titled, "Writing From Nature."

The first is: keep a nature journal. Start with a bound book of blank sheets of paper. For each entry, make a note of the date and the weather.

If you keep a regular record of the weather and other seasonal changes - like when the robins are building their nests and when the Japanese magnolias bloom - you can drop those details into your stories.

Perhaps your character stomps out of the house in anger and jumps onto his favorite swing for solace. He may notice a robin returning to her nest in the Japanese magnolia to feed her babies, who bob up and down begging for bits of food.

In addition to writing down details, try your hand a drawing what you see. In particular, try contour drawing. This drawing is done in one continuous line, with your eyes on the object and your pencil tip on your paper.

Imagine that the tip of the pencil is a ladybug and that the ladybug is crawling along the entire surface of the object. Resist the temptation to look at your drawing while you are making it.

Contour drawing enhances seeing, according to Baldwin, because it nudges aside our left brain tendency to name, giving our right brain the opportunity to see shapes.

Instead of considering a leaf or a shell or a tree, which, we believe, are complex objects that are difficult to draw, we concentrate on lines and shapes, which are not.

"Keeping a nature journal is a great way to produce raw material," Baldwin said. "It helps writers write vividly and convincingly."

In trying this technique at the workshop, which was co-sponsored by the Highlights Foundation and held in Boyds Mills, Penn., I found it helped me to see detail.

As I wandered along Calkins Creek in late April, looking for signs of spring, I noticed three arrow-shaped green shoots poking out of the ground, the beginnings of flowering bulbs. I stopped to make a contour drawing. About five minutes into the drawing, as I put my pencil to some leaves in the foreground, I noticed a fourth shoot.

A good aid in contouring drawing is a simple magnifying glass.

A little further along the creek bank, I noticed a plant growing half in and half out of the water. I noted in my journal that it had leaves with blisters. Then I plucked a leaf from the plant, looked at it through my magnifying lens, and began my drawing. I saw that the 'blisters' were actually tubes. Then I wondered about the function of the tubes. Are they like the tubes on the skins of some marine animals?

Good nature journaling leads to questions. Write the questions down. These may lead to interesting details or may be the seed for a good nonfiction piece.

Another way to expand the material in your nature journal is to try sound mapping. Draw a circle on a blank page. Make an 'X' in the middle. The 'X' marks the spot where you are standing. The circle marks the limits of your hearing.

Stand still and make notes about what you are hearing and where the sounds are coming from. If you recognize bird songs and calls, note the bird's name. If not, describe the sound by noting the number of syllables, whether it is high-pitched or rough.

You may hear water or wind or machines. You will learn, for example, whether your character, sitting on his favorite swing, can hear his friend's garage door opening.

Keeping a nature journal, and using these particular techniques, also work to improve our writing because they coax us into spending more time seeing, listening, smelling, and touching. The details we discover will make our stories sing.

Sarah C. Campbell is a writer and photographer in Jackson, Miss. Her first picture book, a photo essay featuring predatory land snails, is due out from Boyds Mills Press in 2008.