Our lovely kitty image above is figuratively indicative of my intent: as a writer, you must always look at situations with your writer’s eyes. But each eye must have a different focus, while still giving you a clear picture. Before I get into the wherefores of bicameral write-sight, let’s underscore one fundamental: there are stories EVERYWHERE.
No matter if you’re a poet, a journalist, a short-story scribe or a Tweetin’ fool, stories saturate your day—they are in your neighbor’s mail (don’t look without permission), your boss’s impatient gait, how your daughter wrapped your Mother’s Day present, why coins feel cold, a bat’s favorite breakfast, and how endless calls from AT&T about expanding your network offerings make you want to scream.
Stories Are Everywhere
Stories are not the province of the high and mighty movers and shakers; stories rest there too, but they are much the stuff of the commonplace, the cupboard, the errant gesture, the box left on the bus bench. You just need a writer’s eyes to see them.
So back to those bicameral distinctions: You need what I like to call a crazy eye and a calm eye. One eye is your open-to-all experiences self, your id eye, and the other is objective, your superego eye. A small example (and in a larger sense, how stories lurk in everything): You see a brightly colored bird. Your crazy eye opens—is there a story there on how the male birds are most often the ones with the wild plumage? Maybe an article on who the Audubon of today might be, if such a specimen exists.
Branch out: think about your first flight on an airplane. Could one of your characters have an overwhelming aversion to flying on airplanes, so that a scene on one in which he breaks down is pivotal to a story? What did Leonardo da Vinci have in mind when he designed that prototype flying machine?
Rely on Your Crazy Eye, Collect from Your Calm Eye
Let your crazy eye go crazy. Your crazy eye is a speculator, a dreamer, the one that swigs the moonshine even when the lip of the bottle is mossy. When your crazy eye whispers (which is quite a feat for an eye), listen.
But you also need your calm eye. That eye questions and discerns—where might there be a market for that story, what’s the natural lead for the story, do I really want to write that story, is there even a story there? Both eyes are your friends, and both are necessary for seeing that there’s a story in everything, but that that story shouldn’t necessarily be written by you. But you never know unless you open your eyes to it. (Personally, I like the crazy eye—it will sometimes make a crumpled bag in the street appear to be a body, before your wise eye tells you no.)
Your third eye, of course, is your calm Buddha nature, the eye on the face you had before you were born. That eye judges not, but winks at each percolating idea. (Though it does like strong shots of whiskey—oh, wait, that’s somebody else I know.) Keep all your eyes open, and story ideas will flood your inner screening room. Some of those blended visions will find their merry way to the page.
Writers Say Wow!
I’ve always loved the “beginner’s mind” Zen story that goes something like this:
A university professor went to visit a famous Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about Zen. The master poured the visitor’s cup to the brim, and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s overfull! No more will go in!” the professor blurted. “You are like this cup,” the master replied, “How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup.”
I’m as protective of my various opinions—on how crusty bread should be, how far to jut out your chin when denouncing the opposition party’s political platform, why you should wear black because there isn’t a darker color—as the next guy. I’ve gathered those opinions over time, worried over their posture, tried coloring their roots when they have gone a bit gray. But having a stance, an answer and an opinion on everything can be damn tedious sometimes. Sometimes you just want to say “Wow! Now that’s something!”
That’s part of seeing with a writer’s eyes: a feeling, a way of looking, that writers need; it’s a valve opening in your imagination, it’s dropping the opinion suitcases so you can sprint without the weight, it’s room for the fresh taste of the tea.
Wow!
This cross-eyeful was excerpted from my new book (don’t hate me Porter!) Think Like a Writer, linked above in my biological bio. So, eagle-eyed WUers, do you employ a crazy eye and a calm eye when you scan your circumstances for writing ideas? Do you have to concentratedly bug out those writer’s eyes to see story/character/plot possibilities in your daily trade, or are your writer’s eyes naturally wide? What see you?
About Tom Bentley
Tom Bentley is a novelist, essayist, and business and travel writer. (He does not play banjo.) He's published hundreds of freelance pieces in newspapers, magazines, and online. He is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and a how-to book on finding and cultivating your writing voice. His singing is known to frighten the horses. See his lurid website confessions at tombentley.com.
Ha! – “What see you?” I’m just glad you didn’t ask: What smell you? (The dog’s laying nearby, you ‘see.’ Or is that a ‘lie’ -damn, Porter’s right! I can’t be taught to keep that lay/lie thing straight). Before commenting, I spent a moment shopping – and downloading – your “visionary creation.” Looks fab! And how could I not click ‘buy’, after reading Mama T’s eloquent praise (nice job – a wonderful blurb by the perfect blurber).
I’m most intrigued by the third eye you mention. I think mine’s more the Bran Stark’s Crow variety than the blind, semi-charmed-kind-of-life provider. That it was there before I was born makes sense. It’s the only explanation for the places I’m taken when I write. I’m not sure even my wild eye can be responsible for visualizing them. And my calm eye looks obliquely on the mundane aspects of today’s world – perhaps even askance. But that third eye must be gathering and reinterpreting the images crazy-eye sends for analysis. I think the only problem with this sort of triangulation is that calm-eye runs rough-shod over the delivery process. Need to keep him in check – perhaps a pair of 3-D glasses would do the trick, the rosier lens for calm-eye.
Looking forward to reading more of your writerly insights and outlooks, Tom! To Porter’s point, I’m not sure I can be taught to write, but I’m damn-sure I’ll have a blast exploring the ways to better Think Like a Writer. Best wishes for it!
Vaughn, that’s why I have a cat—they continually groom themselves; it can take you all day to lick your dog down.
Though I’ve rarely met a joke I didn’t like, I was alluding in seriousness to that concept of Buddha nature, that sense that there’s a stillness within that precedes our history.
I like that idea in a writer’s conceit, of an instinctual turn toward how we can best tell our stories, in combination with the parsing logic of plot direction and story arc. Yeah, I should run a yoga retreat.
Be careful of your driving with those 3-D glasses on. And thanks for checking out the book.
Awesome analogy, Tom, and great post! Your voice shines through in everything you write; so much so I just had to buy your book!
Thanks.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT
Oh, Denise, dangit, I got so excited when you awesomeized my analogy that I forgot to reply to you directly. But seek ye below, and ye shall find.
Tom-
Ah! Your book sounds terrif. Will read.
Stories are indeed everywhere. It’s your “calm eye” that interests me. To me that is not so much an eye but a portion of the brain that asks questions and applies story principles to what the crazy eye has noticed.
Take the child’s clumsily wrapped gift. The write-brain asks how does that gift produce conflict? What is inside the wrapping? Why should it be feared? How can unwrapping be delayed? What if it can’t? When the wrapping is off what will change? What will the gift reveal to the recipient about herself? What will the gift say to us all about giving?
Then again, maybe it’s best not to put the questions first but to let the crazy eye roam. Good post.
Don, I like that “story principle” calm-eye sense (because somebody’s got to do the trench work). I wrote a short story in which a scruffy vagabond type unnerved a woman by intimating there was something unsettling in the big old doctor’s satchel he carried.
It turned out to be a kitten, a fulcrum on which the story turned. My crazy eye came up with the kitten in a bag, but the calm worked it naturally into the story.
“What’s inside the wrapping” indeed.
In(sight)ful post, Tom. I look forward to reading your book because you speak my language- or rather, we see eye to eye. I love my crazy eye, am working on wiping the dust from my third eye, and wrangle with my calm eye. (You had me with the seeing a bag as a body thing. They’re doing construction down the road from where I live and there are all these body bags, er, really large sand bags lying around. I think to myself, “They should do something about those. That’s disturbing..what a great place for a killer to leave a bag…Poe would love this…” Then, I realize I might be the disturbed one and drink more coffee.)
Anyway, I think I’ve always seen with my crazy eye and this is why my muse- a cranky goblin with an affection for drink- get along so well. Most days. When he’s not hitting me over the head with a tankard of ale. That’s when I know I’m not seeing what’s right in front of me and connecting the dots.
Thank you for sharing and giving us a glimpse into your philosophy.
Tonia, I love that you brought Poe out of his body bag. There’s a fellow whose work is drenched with voice—all his gaseous miasmas and hammering hearts. I loved to read Poe; I wonder if anyone writes in that adjectivally larded mouldering-leaves-and-menace style today, or if we just wouldn’t have the patience for it. (Of course Edgar was said to fancy more than a tankard or two himself.)
Thanks for giving us an eyeful of your own philosophy (and put those construction-site baggers into a tale).
Gosh Denise, I hope this post doesn’t seem like a blunt hammer shilling for my book (it’s supposed to be a subtle hammer). The voice thing can be tricky in that of course you don’t want to be locked into ways of phrasing and rhythm where your butcher from Chicago character sounds like the kid whose parents just bought him a top hat after graduating from Eton.
But I’m alluding more to how, even with the variant breadth of his characters, someone like Cormac McCarthy suffuses his work with an unmistakeable voice, a combination of diction, syntax, attitude and magic. I fall under the spell of voices like that. Marilynne Robinson does it to me too—there’s such a feeling of depth.
No worries, Tom. I am not easily persuaded to click the buy button for anything, let alone a book, but I love the way you write, think, put ‘it’ out there, so hearing about your book was a good thing. I look forward to pouring myself a glass of wine after the kiddies have crashed and reading your insightful ideas on craft.
Thanks a bunch!
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT
Tom,
I love an article that starts with a chuckle, then sprinkles them throughout. I definitely need a maid.
I’ve always been of a similar philosophy: the crazy eye, the calm eye, and the inner (third) eye; noticing everything and wondering how (or even if) it can play into a story. My problem is getting the calm eye to focus without a monocle. Calming the calm eye, so to speak. The third eye just laughs.
Great article, of course. I love your metaphors (swigs the moonshine when the lip of the bottle is mossy). Ha! Like the lip of my bottle would ever get mossy.
Now…to go buy that damn book. Sounds good. Hope it’s cheap. It’s cutting into my maid budget.
Mike, I get you on the “calming the calm eye” line. That spotter needs to slowly sift through the sensation of the crazy eye’s gathering. Of course you don’t want to stuff your stories with every darling that catches your eye, just because they are fetching in the moment—your story will topple from all the loose lines.
But I do love this advice from Annie Dillard (I quoted her in the book) about using the resources you gather:
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. … Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
The maid budget is rough. Maybe you could just not wear your glasses around the house, so that every glaring dust mote turns into a softly pleasant blur?
Tom,
I’ve always thought of myself as a three-eyes monster when I sit down to write. Thanks to your post today, I know it’s actually true.
I just love your analogy for the creative process and how looking outward–both wild and rational–and inward creates a perfect blend that transmutes the raw material of experience into ineffable prosaic beauty. This weekend I think I saw it in action. I usually spend each weekend writing. Boy, what a crazy week (perhaps I should say past 2 months). It would easy to let the wild, unruly emotions pollute my fiction. Instead, I’ve got a balancing act–your calm eye–a way of sitting back and slipping into the story manifold, like stepping through the veil of a temple. All experience, all life, all insecurity, all speculation from the life of John, it changes shape when I enter this space. Light shines from on high (the inner eye, perhaps), illuminating the sacred work I do in that space. When I leave, I step back and look at the story and see something else, something beyond me, something that came from me but wasn’t only me and my wildness. Every time I enter again, the work becomes purer, more beautiful the next time I step out and look. It’s a great process.
Thanks for the opportunity to be reflective on my process, and congratulations on your book release!
John, it’s funny, when I read your comment, it did make me think of writers as high priests (and priestesses) of a sort. Poring over manuscripts, invoking the muse, the whiff of incense and ink.
But taking it a little further from your iconic image, I immediately saw you as the monk in the cell, carefully designing one of those ornate rubric letters that open some ancient manuscripts. I do hope you get out to walk the dog.
I do like that sense of returning to the work after a renewal and seeing it fresh (or shaping it from whatever new was gained in the departure).
I get out for lots of walks–those are the best times to work on the crazy eye, and the calm. And let me clarify when I say I write on weekends, I don’t cloister myself to a room. Only, I intentionally do not write any other time, so that I have 5 days away from the story to think critically about it and let the organic matter of life breathe and direct me well when it comes time to write and grow some more. When I write, I usually write in coffee shops. Those are my temples, the best place to have all three eyes working at once.
:=)
John, many are the days I need coffee to just open one of my eyes. Keep frequenting those temples.
Thanks for the awesome post!
It’s all said very deep and metaphorical. Love your author’s terms like “crazy and calm eyes”. Brilliant!
Pimion, I’m rarely accused of being deep, but I deeply appreciate the comment.
Hi Tom,
I love this article . . . I do, however, think I have more than one crazy eye. Or at least I have one crazy eye that never sleeps or even blinks.
As an everything-noticer, I assume that everyone else is also an everything-noticer. So when I say, “Oh my gosh, did you hear/see/smell that?” and the person I am with (husband, friend, kid, bathing cat) says, “No. See what?” I am astounded. Because it was so obvious.
Some days I’d really love to stop noticing every little thing. Then again, I bet the day I took a noticing smoke break would be the same day a BLOCKBUSTER BREAKOUT NOVEL IDEA walked right in front of me, playing a trombone and castanets and wearing neon plaid. But I’d miss it.
So I guess it’s good that my crazy eye works overtime. I’m glad yours does too as your sense of humor and your smartness is a personal highlight.
Happy book releasing!
On another topic, don’t you wish you knew what John Robin actually looks like? And how old he is? I do. It kind of kills me that I don’t.
I just bought your book. Thank you and yay!
Yes, I am replying to my own comment. This book is HYSTERICAL and so helpful. And there’s a photo of your mom and the tanked priest!
Bless you. I am going to use parts of this book with my kids this summer. They have been warned that there will be writing. They are not excited, but your book will help immensely.
Sarah, because u have mad skillz, I’m officially hiring you to answer any other comments here. (Note: you cannot use the words “demimonde” “pettifog” or “ingrown” in any of your replies.)
Nodding yes (eyes crossed) to your comment on taking too much in with the crazy eye. I have scads of story ideas that gleam. But fool’s gold—I often do nothing with them but admire their glitter. The old butts-in-seats adage is well worth the wearing.
But to answer your most pressing question: John Robin looks exactly like the cat in this post. Except he wears a jester’s hat. And carries a gavel. (No briefcase.)
Oh, and goodness me—thanks for getting the book!
I want the cat!
David, that does remind me of that famous National Lampoon cover from way back: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog”
Of course, I’d never lower myself to such a thing. I’d just threaten to deny the cat its next 16-hour nap. That’d show it.
Hey, Tom:
I’m reminded of something Cyra McFadden once said: A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.
I find Crazy Eye particularly engaged when I’m in magpie mode, collecting anything and everything I think might be of interest. Sometimes these things come to me when I’m driving and if Mette, my wife, is there, I’ll have her text me my idea so I’ll have it on my phone.
In particular, I often find highway signs provide character names I never would have imagined otherwise: like Buttonwillow McKittrick, a character in THE MERCY OF THE NIGHT, and Ralston Polhemus, who shows up in DONE FOR A DIME.
Of course, Calm Eye needs to know where such things belong, otherwise they’ll feel shoehorned in.
I also notice that once I begin actually writing a book, I begin seeing everything in the context of the story — does this fit in, does this not fit in, could I use it? The antenna is constantly on, seeking reception.
Great post. Thanks.
David, I very much like “The antenna is always on, seeking reception” in light of then seeing things in the context of the story and not trying to fit them in just because they had wings when you saw them. And “Buttonwillow McKittrick”—that’s glorious!
By the way, I’ve meant to take one of your classes (even though I’m not a mystery guy, but I love what you do here) up at Book Passage (which is in driving range), but just haven’t got it done. But someday…
Tom, no matter how many eyes I possess, apparently none of them can read yesterday’s journal entry. That would be the one in which I promise myself that I won’t purchase another writing book until I’ve made use of the ones I already possess. Oh, well. You had me at the moss-lipping line.
Jan, I know what you mean—I have a number of books on writing ready for these weary writer’s eyes. (In fact, I need to finish Mahatma Maass’ oldie-but-greatie Writing the Breakout Novel.)
And I need to re-read William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” again, in honor of his recent passing. I think it’s one of the finest books on writing ever, written with grace and persuasion. Onward through the pages!
I think I see with both. Last week, the local news covered a local cryogenics organization. I didn’t even know a place like that existed, let alone in my hometown. For $200K you can have your body frozen until scientists come up with a way to bring you back from the dead. My wild eye was like “That is some crazy shit”, but calm eye was like “Huh. Cryogenics. What would happen if…?” I firmly believe that there’s a story in every day life. If you’re not finding anything, then you’re walking around with your eyes closed. I hope to God that I don’t get to that point, because then someone needs to bitch-slap me and take away my Writer Card. LOL
Evolet, cryogenics is some crazy shit (just ask Ted Williams). I suspect that you’re going to hang on to your writer card for a while (though give that crazy eye a break with some sunglasses now and then).