See Like a Writer & Write About What You See

Stuck on what to write about and suffering from writer’s block? Then here’s an antidote that might help. Give yourself permission to take time out to look around you. Take a walk. There are writing ideas all over the place. Look around you and be inspired by people, landscapes, objects, animals … the list is endless.

A writer sees beyond face value. The landscape itself holds an abundance of stories. Some people walk by a bush and see a bush. A fiction writer walks by that same bush and sees something looking out back at him. Others imagine what happened around that bush, or wonder about the wee people that call the bush home, or the spirits that once inhabited the branches and roots and endowed it with magic.

Or perhaps the imagination leads a writer to weave stories around the lives of the countless people who walked past that bush during the week, or maybe they think about the unseen ones that have also walked past that same bush. The people we never ever see.

Same scene, different writers, and separate stories.

A nonfiction writer looks at the bush and notices how the plant is growing, where it is growing and why. And what is that plant, its name, they wonder? What are its properties. What is it used for? Is it beneficial to humanity. They see past first…