How Noticing Becomes Story

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching sessions on writing place—through noticing, embodiment, and writing small. And in almost every session, some version of the same question comes up:

How does noticing actually turn into story?

Because that’s the part that isn’t always obvious. Not the noticing itself—but what to do with it.

A few years ago, I took a workshop with poet and memoirist Nick Flynn and he talked about how, as he moves throughout the day, he collects small physical objects. Things he finds as he walks down the street, as he visits new places. These might be fragments, scraps, whatever catches his attention, like a rock, a piece of paper, etc. He collects as many as he can and then later, he lays them out and tries to see a shape or pattern emerge.

It’s such a simple practice, but it feels very close to how writing actually works and is very similar to what I’m trying to teach through the practice of noticing:

What we notice in our lives impacts and shapes our ideas and our writing.

Yesterday, I was walking in the rain—it was warm, the birds were singing, and the road was covered in dozens of worms trying to make their way across. This stuck with me all day, because I was a little horrified to notice most of them weren’t making it to the other side.

I didn’t go home and write about worms, exactly. But I did return to my work thinking about what it means to push through something difficult—to keep going, even when the odds aren’t great.

And this understanding gave me clarity about what I was trying to say in a short story I’ve been working on. (I did briefly consider writing a sci-fi horror piece about it, but that’s not really my genre.)

When I’m stuck, when I don’t know what I’m trying to say or where to begin, I start paying attention to the things around me, to the concrete details that seem to carry weight and linger in my mind. But noticing does not need to stop at concrete details. Instead, it can become more about entry into an idea or a place.

I think of this as raw material to get me moving.

However, noticing doesn’t stop once you’ve started writing. If anything, it becomes more important.

Because at some point, the work shifts. It’s no longer just about just gathering—it becomes about deciding. What do you include? What do you leave behind? What actually belongs in the piece you’re trying to make?

Just because you notice it (or write it), doesn’t mean it’s relevant to your story.

I think this is where a lot of us get stuck. We either try to hold onto everything, afraid to lose something important, or we cut too quickly, before we’ve given the material enough time to reveal what it’s doing.

This just happened to me while revising my novel. I would like to think I have gotten very good at noticing details, at zooming in on the work. However, when I zoomed out to look at the patterns of the full manuscript, I realized I had a lot of beautiful, lovely details that were not crucial to my story. (Kill your darlings, right?)

Here, noticing can work as a revision tactic, too. By slowing down and looking again we can see the words we are intimately familiar with in a different way—through patterns and shapes.

With my novel, I did this by way of reverse outlining, and organizing each chapter by theme. The more I did this, the more I realized that some of the details I loved the most were connected to themes that were not relevant to the story.

We have to pay attention not just to what we’ve noticed and collected, but to what is underneath it—to the patterns, the tensions, the small threads that start to connect.

If you want to try this, keep it simple. Over the next day or so, collect a handful of things that catch your attention. They don’t need to be meaningful or impressive—in fact, it’s better if they’re not. Write them down.

Then come back to them later and look at them together. See what patterns emerge.

And then write from one small part of it and see where it takes you.

If you try this, I’d love to hear what you find!