Life-Writer's Notebook

Writing About the Little Things
Our lives are made up of little things--a moment of pleasure as you watch a bird at the feeder; a wince of pain when someone's careless remark hits and hurts; a meditative evening with a wonderful book; a long lunch with a friend. Oh, there are a few of the "big moments"--a wedding, a birth, a graduation, a promotion. But when you stop to think about it, the big moments come and go like brilliant flashes of lightning in a thunderstorm, while the small moments, the little things, light our lives like a constant candle, always burning, always there.

As lifewriters, we need to learn to pay attention to the small things, in the same way that artist Georgia O'Keeffe did in her work. If you've seen her paintings of flowers (you can, by visiting the web site above), you know that she magnified each small blossom so that each tiny element of it looms large in the artist's and viewer's eye. As lifewriters, we can do the same sort of thing, simply by paying attention to the little things, the small moments in our lives: by magnifying them, looking closely to see what really happened and what it means, by paying attention. In fact, just paying attention, all by itself, is really all we need to do.

Here are some ways you can practice paying attention to small things. These are just suggestions--you can adapt them in any way to fit your writing practice and your life situation.

• Each day for a week, choose one small thing that happened that day. Describe it in detail, then magnify the details, paying attention to each one, teasing them apart, reassembling them. Use plain language or fancy (poetic, metaphoric), whatever suits your purpose. Just write until you understand the importance of this one small thing.

• Each day for a week, make a list of the small things that made you happy during the day: a fragrant bath, a bird song, an email from a friend, a new recipe. At the end of the week, choose one thing and write a page or two about it, magnifying the details, paying attention to each tiny part of the experience, recapturing the experience as you describe it and relive it.

• Choose one day when you have some free time (preferably at the end of the day), and write down everything you did that day. Yes, every little thing, as many as you can recall! Notice how hard it is to remember the tiny events that are the real stuff of our lives, how they disappear into our consciousness like a pebble in a pool. Now, choose one of these little things and write about it as if it were the most important thing to happen to you all year. Magnify it! Make it big and important, like one of O'Keeffe's wonderful flowers.

It's true. To see takes time. To write about our lives takes time, and we often put it off by saying, "Oh, I didn't do anything important today." Yes, you did. Every breath is important, every perception, every thought. Try writing about the small things, and be surprised into seeing just how significant they are.
--Susan Wittig Albert