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In between writing, you are living your life. You are going out to cafes, meeting friends, taking the bus, changing diapers, putting in your work hours, washing dishes. Take inspiration from the concrete details, the vivacity of the world around you.
Memory can be thinner than reading a book, Harvard Prof. Elaine Scary claims, because reading directs the senses much as the mind does in day-to-day life, and thus reading replicates living more closely than does memory!
So notice what it’s like to notice. Take the rough brick wall in the garden cafe, with its dips and patches, its butterscotch goo dried on in swaths here and there. What makes them so real to you, sitting there? Are they the detail that defines the cafe? Or is it the skylight, a reverse hottub of wood with light jetting in from above? I guess that would depend on your character’s mood and situation, wouldn’t it? Some days are brick wall days, some days are light pouring in days.
Notice how your own mood impacts how and what you see, hear, smell . . . In a sense, even when you are writing narrative, you are your own laboratory, constantly examining and testing for how a human consicousness and a setting interact with each other. In turn, you create a world for your reader.
Let the concrete, vivid world give you permission as a writer. This textured, scented, hard and soft world moves us. It deserves a place in your writing. These flawed and fumbling people change our lives. Let them into your work, too. Be brave. Reach out and pull what you love of the world and what you hate of it, too, right onto the page.
Happy Writing!