My #1 Piece of Writing Advice

And also just a pretty great way to live…

I love talking about writing in classes and workshops, and every single time I do, this is where I start:

Get it all down now, right now, with as many sense details as possible.

Pay attention to everything, notice everything, and practice describing it in great detail.

Use all five senses—write about the exact color of the sky, the particular sound of her voice, precisely how your body felt in that exact moment. Write about the weather, the headlines, the smells, the sounds, the moon, the barking dog, the smell of exhaust, that twinge in your ribs when he walked in.

Good writing starts with sense-oriented details. It’s how you help your readers join you in your story, in this moment, this location, this feeling.

Here’s a way to practice: I call it GLIMPSES--I do this every night when I’m in a writing season.

Every night, look back on your day and write three extremely detailed glimpses—almost like snapshots of your day.

It could be a bite of food—the texture and smell and what it reminded you of as you ate. It could be a conversation—the timbre of his voice, the way his hand kept running through his hair. It could be the slant of the light on the red brick, brightening to gold just before the last flashes of daylight.

Notice with all five senses—smell, touch, hear, taste, see.

Notice the world around you—the weather, the news, the time of year, what’s happening on the calendar or in your neighborhood.

Notice what’s happening inside you--in your mind, your body, your feelings.

Here’s the thing: when we first start writing something, we don’t always know what the story is about, or how each glimpse will grow in significance, how it might illustrate a theme or hook together like a string of pearls with other glimpses from other days. We don’t always know the architecture of what we’re building at first—we pay attention and write the glimpses and over time, it starts to become clear.

Sometimes you’ll realize months later that what you want to write about is the passage of time. You realize that you have a handful of glimpses that capture that theme perfectly—good job, you, for investing in your future with your glimpses, because it’s those sense details that bring your writing to life in a way that raw concepts never can, and they’re nearly impossible to backfill after the fact. Those glimpses become the gold that make your writing personal and beautiful, the details that reach out to your reader with both hands, inviting them right into the center of your story.

And here’s why this practice is a life-changer—literally!—for all of us, writers or not: because noticing is sacred work. These are our lives. These are the rising moons and bites of cake and sounds of laughter and sore shoulders that make up our lives. And they’re worth noticing, treasuring, recording. It all matters, all of it.

You might find it’s hard at first, that you sit down at the end of the day and can’t really think of anything. You might find that your mind feels sort of blank—what did I do today? Anything? What did I eat? Where was I? That’s exactly why the practice is important, because the glimpses get us into our senses, our bodies, our actual locations, instead of shuffling through days disconnected from everything.

Keep going. Keep going, and I promise it will get easier. Keep going, and you’ll find at a certain point that you could write 10 glimpses instead of three, and that you start to see the glimpses even as they’re happening. You hear new things in peoples’ voices, and the sky becomes a feature length film and the world is full of texture and your body is signaling to you all day long—it’s all been there all along, but now you’re a noticer. Now you’re a writer.

You notice more as you notice more—it’s a flywheel.

So that’s it: 3 glimpses at the end of every day, and I can’t wait to hear what you start to see, feel, notice. I can’t wait to hear how beautiful and full of dimension your writing becomes as you tune in more and more deeply to what’s always been unfolding around you—and more than your writing, your life.

Here's to the details, to living as a noticer, to choosing to believe that it all matters, because our lives matter—the big and the little, the wild and the mundane, the dreams and the snacks, the whispers and the howls and the whole big thing. It all matters.