Aaron Hamburger Recommends...

“I keep going back to Flannery O’Connor’s quote: ‘The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.’

An exercise that I often give my fiction students (because it works for me) is to jot down the five senses on a piece of paper, then go for a walk and collect as many details as I can that correspond to sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. The second part of the assignment is that during this walk, there’s no talking allowed. Great writers are really great noticers of life. You can’t come up with beautiful words and sentences if they aren’t somehow rooted in the kind of detail that can only be gleaned from life by becoming incredibly still and focused. It’s a state of being in the world that’s become increasingly rare and hard to achieve, but not impossible.”
—Aaron Hamburger, author of Faith for Beginners (Random House, 2006)

 

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