Writing is about noticing

I enjoyed this conversation between David Perell and Anne Lamott on making your writing unforgettable. This from Anne on the role noticing and awareness plays resonated for me:

[Writing is] not about accumulating more experiences, because that often creates more pressure. It’s about paying better attention. I had a priest friend, an old man named Terry Ritchie, who recently passed away. He used to say, “The point is not to try harder; it’s to resist life less.” So, it’s not about trying to force something to happen or “jiggle it out of the universe.” It’s about awareness. It’s about agreeing to simply become aware and to start noticing. You might notice a certain colour, and that’s all you need. I don’t need the grand experience. I could describe your orchids, the slightly greenish-yellow inside the centre of your orchid, and then use that detail to describe someone’s eyes later. I just notice it. The writer’s job is to pay attention to life as it tromps by.

She then added:

This is a bit off-topic, but there was a priest named Father Dowling who helped the very neurotic Bill Wilson get AA off the ground in 1935. Father Dowling told Bill, “Sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” I use that concept in all my Bird by Bird writing workshops because it’s about putting on a better pair of glasses and truly waking up. It’s about stopping hitting the snooze button and starting to pay attention to people’s faces, their eyes, the landscape, the sky, and the ground beneath you. What we do to meet our writing self is to meet it halfway by noticing. I’m not suggesting you fill up with more experiences or more friends. Instead, you simply start paying really close attention.