Writing the world is not the same thing as writing about the world. Writing about the world is merely reporting: This is what I saw. Writing the world is much more involved: This is what I was an integral part of at a particular time, this is what the wholeness of the experience meant to me, and this is what I hope you'll take away from my record of it. Writing the world is, basically, creating (or recreating) the world.
       Each of us is and all of us are an integral part of everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch, and everything that sees, hears, tastes, smells, or touches us. To truly write the world, you have both to observe and to enable observation to cause your reader to be able to observe.
      The trick to real, thorough observation is to first understand that, as stuffy as it sounds, you truly are the center of your own universe. Everything you sense (see, hear, etc) is external to you and to your sensors. In other words, you cannot observe things from any point of view but your own, and nobody else can observe things from your point of view. Likewise, every other sentient being is also the center of its/his/her own universe. Okay, now let me get the trite stuff out of the way: Although its true that each decision or movement you make causes ripples that affect every thing and every one else in your universe and vice versa, our purpose here is to get beyond that surface ripple effect.
      Even though we each view everything external to us from a unique, central vantage point, we've also erected a series of veils or masks between us and what is around us masks between us and what we observe. Most of the masks are subconscious limits we either have placed on ourselves or have allowed others to place on us. For example, we don't want to be perceived by others as acting childish or immature. Since observation is central to creation or duplication, these masks are a strong hindrance, and one that most of us never realized existed.
      For example, if we see a child down on his knees watching a life and death struggle between a spider and an ant, we think nothing of it. What might we think of an adult doing the same thing? A child's imaginary friend is a wonderful thing, we think. But what do we think of Uncle Harry when he insists he talks with an imaginary friend on a regular basis? (Running a story premise past an imaginary friend might be an excellent way to get valuable feedback, dont you suppose? Scientists will say you're accessing your subconscious mind, but so what? What difference does it make whether it's your own subconscious or a 'real' imaginary friend?) If a child looks up at a beech tree and comments on the 'faces' she sees in the wrinkled bark, we think it's cute; what do we think of an adult doing the same thing? Finally, children often do and say things for no other reason than to get a reaction; do you? Why not?
      One of my favorite poems is "Apprentice," by Janice Braud. In it, she inadvertently speaks volumes about observation:

You say you want to learn
a Shaman's ways. You want
to summon the wind, squeeze
rain out of cloudless skies.
You say you have danced
an Eagle Dance to open
the Chakras of your heart.
You have burned tobacco
to test for spirits. You have
washed yourself with the
bark of a chokeberry.
You say you can rise to meet
the sun, answer the pull
of the moon. Your heart is
strong and ready for conquest.

 Perhaps that is so . . .

But can you sit in silence
at the foot of Mother Earth,
can you walk with a vision
of your own bones unhinged
and scattered, cracked open
for the marrow? Can you
sit still enough, long enough
to hear the slow fall of dust,
to hear the laughter of the
land and count the threads
in a thistleball?

You say you did not understand
what was required.
I know.

      Consider the following sense-by-sense exercises for going beyond the masks:

Sight: Have you ever gone beyond thinking the trunk of the tree in your yard is brown or tan or grey? Can you describe or even relate the color of a dragonfly? Can you describe a cloud without using the word fluffy and/or without comparing it to cotton? According to your eyes, what color is the sky? How many colors are there in your front yard? What are they? Since, according to science, sight is a result of our perception of light rays reflecting off of objects, and since those light rays exist between the object and our eyes, do we actually see physical objects or do we see only the colors that reflect off of them? (Do you still feel safe driving? For that matter, if all we can see is the reflection of light also known as 'color' then what color is 'clear'?) How long has it been since you've specifically noticed the tiny specks drifting around in a ray of light? Are you absolutely certain they aren't tiny worlds populated with even tinier beings? Can you prove it or disprove it? Which ones are just dust? What is dust? Which ones are tiny insects or other creatures? Look around you with the eyes of a child.

Smell: We've all smelled the aroma of fresh-baked bread (near a bakery) or of burned grease (near a hamburger joint) while driving; have you ever noticed the specific border between the odiferous air and the 'clean' air? In other words, have you actively tried to ascertain the specific scents in the air? (Actually, we do use our sense of smell continually; most of us just don' t do so consciously. For example, how long does it take for you to notice a different, possibly dangerous smell in your home? Even simply being aware that we use our sense of smell subconsciously is more than most of us were aware of before.) Take a walk and test the air for different aromas.

Taste: Most of us know that substances taste different when placed on the tip of the tongue (sweet) or further back on the tongue (bitter), but do we go beyond that? When we're cooking, we taste the soup to determine whether it's lacking a particular spice, don't we? Applying that same sensitivity to other tasting opportunities will provide a lot of input. What does a spoon taste like by itself? Can you describe it? We all know that the senses of smell and taste are closely related: What about the sense of touch? Doesn't taste have a great deal to do with touch, with how an object feels in the mouth? Does a spoonful of nothing taste different when the spoon is warm than when the spoon has been chilled?

Hearing: When we go to the symphony, most of us find ourselves trying to pick out one instrument or sound from the others; this is a normal capability, but do you also do that in your everyday life? Can you hear more than one conversation at once in a grocery store? Can you tell what a person thinks of himself (cocky, self-assured, unworthy, etc) by the tone of his voice and/or by the words he uses? (Can your readers tell the same things about your characters by the words and phrases they use?) Is there a difference between the way a woman says "Yes" to a marriage proposal and to the way she says "Yes" to an officer asking whether she knows why he pulled her over? Does your vacuum cleaner roar, hum, or whine? What's the difference? What are those little peripheral sounds that seem to dance around the radio station to which you've tuned? Would they make a difference to a character in one of your stories?

Touch: Believe it or not, there are physical objects in this world that you can't actually feel like a dandelion seed or a wisp of cotton, for example. How do you describe these? When you touch objects you can actually feel, do you notice their different textures and the features of those textures? A single surface might be soft and rough and warm (dryer sheet) or slick and hard and cold (the chilled spoon). If you've learned to 'touch type,' you come to think of the typing (okay, keyboarding) as practically automatic. Cover your fingertips with bandaids or those little rubber cups and try again. Is typing still as automatic as you thought?

Imagination and Negative Capability: I know these are not senses, but the first might as well be it's both needed as much and used as little by adults as are the physical senses and the other is an ability that can be developed through honing the senses and combining them with imagination.
      My American Heritage College Dictionary defines imagination in the first place as the "formation of a mental image of something that is neither perceived as real nor present to the senses," and in the second as the "ability to confront and deal with reality creatively." The perception spoken of in the first definition is, I suspect, some 'normal' perception; in other words, the perception of an adult, a surface perception. Believing a tree trunk is any color other than brown, by this definition, might be considered a function of imagination. So for our purposes as writers, lets define imagination as the ability to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell beyond the obvious.
      According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Fifth Edition (Oxford U Press, New York, 1985), negative capability, a term coined by poet John Keats, is the

      "receptivity necessary to the process of poetic creativity. In a letter . . . he wrote, 'If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.' [sic] Keats regarded Shakespeare as the prime example of negative capability, attributing to him the ability to identify completely with his characters . . . ." [emphasis added]

      Simply put, negative capability is the innate ability of some and the acquired ability of others to lie and to do so absolutely convincingly. It is the ability to actually be someone else, to further suspend your reader's disbelief by experiencing as a character something you've never actually experienced, and to do so convincingly. You must do two things to achieve negative capability: You must practice actually being your character (in your mind if not physically), and you must practice layering on detail after detail. It is the details that convince the audience that the character is real. For example, if you're writing a story about a soldier's marksmanship training from WW II through the beginning of the Vietnam war, you probably should know what an "M-1 Thumb" is. (When allowing the bolt to seat on an M-1 carbine, often a soldier's thumb was pinched, sometimes seriously.)
      So can you really write convincingly about something you've never done? Yes. You can't know all the details, but you can emphasize the ones you do know. Try this exercise: Close your eyes and imagine you're in a foxhole. It's been extremely quiet for a few hours and very soon you'll return to your hooch to sleep while someone else takes over the watch. Just as your head tilts slightly forward so you can glance down to peer at the luminous hands on your watch, all hell breaks loose. Dozens of tiny explosions sound from across the field in front of your position. You know some are hitting nearby because you can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel what? Are you scared? Calm? Frantic? How can you convey that to the reader? By the application of details. Consider this excerpt from a short story I wrote, "Soft as a Breeze":

      . . . till that one, scalding, blinding-white instant when all hell breaks loose and then is reconfined. All in that split second. I mean there's a big lead-up that's sort of excitin' and scary and lasts longer than time, when things are happening all around you and you're living for a hole and grabbing your rifle and trying to stick a magazine in upside down and throwing ammo to your buddy and dodging sounds all at once, kind of like a spooked house cat. But it's still okay cause it ain't happening directly to you.
      Then there's that scalding-hot second of pure hell when the whole damn mess centers on you. Just you. When you're 'll by yourself and so is your buddy who's only a foot away. When you think the earth is spitting little puffs of dirt at you til an eternity-long split second later when you remember it's bullets. When all the rain in every drizzly, miserable cloud on earth is falling within a two-foot radius of the center of your head, and everything and everyone is screaming at you or past you and you can't do anything as fast or as good as you have every day of your life. Like duck or run or get out of the mud or find a trigger or remember a friend who pulled you out of a tunnel two weeks ago. Then the instant ends, and you're alive. And you've got to get capable again.
      You start to stop shaking and you think of a cigarette and reach for one. Then Mom flashes a disapproving look through your mind, but you reach anyway. Then you want to joke with your friend, show him you*re both still bad, tell him Charlie'd rather sandpaper a bear's ass in a phone booth than mess with you. And he smiles kind of soft in your mind and you want to offer to split that extra beer in your pack with him, you know. Split a beer with the wind, you think, maybe help his nerves a little bit, and you smile. So you think to reach for it, but decide to joke first and get the beer in a second. And you're smiling and turning your head and opening your mouth to tell him about bear's asses in phone booths
      But his face is gone.
      Then your body is turning inside out and you can't hear, and all you feel is screaming and scalding water on your cheeks, even in the rain that's too damn hard and cold and miserable to care about anything. And four guys jump on you like the rain and the wind, hard, like thugs. Take your breath like a gale, like a damn firestorm, not soft, not like a breeze, and they yell things like Shhh! and Shut up! and they use your name like they know you. But you scream right through their hands, right through the blood and the bits of bone and the grimy meat of their filthy, muddy hands. Screaming.

      There's a lot of detail in this scene. Notice, too, that it seems to go on forever. The five paragraphs show the intimate details of something that happened during only a few seconds. But did you get bored with it? In addition to adding detail, I also used long, rambling sentences to further convey the sense of high emotion. You can do the same thing with any topic. The key is to consciously think about what kind of effect you want to have on the reader, then consider how to go about achieving that effect.
      Get in the habit of actively observing the world around you. Concentrate on consciously learning not only the sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound of things going on around you, but the why or how of those sights, smells, tastes, touches, and sounds. Be a truly sentient being; strive to be truly in touch and in tune with the rest of everything. Soon enough, active observation will become a habit and you won't have to think about it. It might be a good idea to keep a pen and paper handy.
      Say What if a lot. All good stories begin with What if. Get in the habit of wondering how a particular scene would look if this were different or that were added. What if such and such suddenly happened?
      Put words to the sounds you hear. Get in the habit of doing this so it becomes a continual exercise for you as you observe. Is the wind swishing through the trees? Is it snapping through the trees? Is it whispering through the leaves? Is it hushing through the trees? If your reader sees your character ". . . leaning into the frigid wind, quick-howling through the canyons of cement . . . ." where might the character be? Is the picture clear?
      Employ transferrence. Transfer a set of feelings or emotions or sensations that you've experienced to a new situation your character is experiencing. Here are some examples of transferrence:
      Have you ever been so immediately and thoroughly frightened that you felt as if time had stopped or switched to slow motion? How did you act during that time? How did you feel mentally/emotionally/ physically (confused, paralyzed/fearful to the point of tears/nauseated, choking, etc)? What were your perceptions of your surroundings? (Is there a train/bus/other car bearing down on you, glass bursting inward, tires screeching, overbearing rumbling sound, smell of burnt rubber, burnt hair, burnt flesh, pain in your eyes, etc?) Say your experience with this sensation happened during a car accident. Even a small fender-bender can cause some of these heart-stopping sensations. Can you transfer how you felt, what you sensed, etc, to your character, who's about to be attacked by a gunman on a subway platform in New York? or who's about to come under heavy fire in a foxhole and look up to discover his friend was killed without his knowing it? or who's just about to slip and fall as he tiptoes along the edge of the wall high atop Hoover Dam to impress his girlfriend?
      Let's go another direction: Have you ever been so mind-numbingly excited and/or nervous that you physically trembled? What were your thoughts? How did you try to calm yourself? Looking back, did it work? Why or why not? Were you completely out of control? How did that feel? Can you transfer that to your character, a teenager who's about to have his first sexual encounter? A middle-aged father who's about to give away his first daughter in a marriage ceremony? A young woman who's about to be reunited with her natural mother after having been separated for the past twenty years?
      The idea is to use extreme emotions. Extreme emotion, because it's over the top, is easier to convey than mediocre emotion, and it's a lot more interesting.
      Writing the world really is a simple proposition. It requires nothing more than observation and the ability to enable your reader to observe. Observation requires letting go of many of the societal norms we've been taught, both consciously and subliminally, and looking through believing eyes to the world that exists beyond the masks we've built. Look for the magic in the world rather than trying to explain it away. And enabling your readers to observe through your eyes requires that you study the mechanics and techniques of writing so that the mental movies you convey are not only interesting, but striking; not only loud, but explosive; not only quiet but hushed. It's your choice. Don't choose to write about the world as it was created and is viewed by everyone else. Rather, create the world as you see it. Write the world.   

HARVEY STANBROUGH is a poet, writer, and freelance editor whose works have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and a Frankfurt Award. He also has taught workshops on writing dialogue, creating realistic characters, writing poetry, and the importance of observation.