Lilith Saintcrow

Monday’s post brought a number of comments–thank you, everyone–and one intriguing question.

Cat asked:

What’s the trick to un-obnoxious observation? I’m an aspiring author and it seems to me like a good thing to learn. I live now in a rural area, but I spent the majority of my teens and half my adult years in an urban city environment. The kinda place where a wrong look to the wrong person could get you in big trouble real fast, especially for (at the time) a single, pretty, petite girl like I was. So I’ve cultivated the habit of keeping my eyes down, my thoughts to myself and just going about my business. Even though now I live in a rural area where people are more friendly and open, I find it a hard habit to shake. I’ve even had friends and family feel slighted because I didn’t notice them waving at me in traffic or other places, but the truth is I just didn’t see them because I’ve trained myself not to look around.

This may be part of the reason why as a young author I find it difficult at times with characterization. I feel that un-obnoxious observation would help me in this regard. So any advice or little tricks you could give about author observation techniques would be extremely helpful.

Hm. Well, characterization, I firmly believe, is a stepdaughter of observation and perhaps the niece of sympathy, certainly the handmaiden of imagination. So while one can’t reduce characterization to observation, observation is definitely a large part of it.

Being an inveterate voyeur as a writer also carries with it the responsibility of respecting people’s privacy to reasonable extents. Eavesdropping is seductive, and it can turn pathological (though I don’t know how much of that pathology is the result of someone just determined to be a jerk from the beginning; but that’s another blog post entirely). This is why I like to use the qualifier “un-obnoxious”.

To fully discuss this, I think we should start with a brief note about my childhood, therapy, and then talk about massage school, just to set the stage.

It was a family truism that I “had my head in the clouds”. I remember my grandfather endlessly telling me that I had to wake up and pay attention to the “real world”. Of course I was an imaginative child, but I always thought I was kind of heedless until my therapist told me I was actually hyperaware. She made this statement when I asked her how I could focus better and pay attention more. She noted that I came into her inner office and always chose a specific seat–one that was uncomfortable, but placed so I could see the room and had an easy exit, and that I was always perched on the edge of it and watching her face and the door at once.

That was, incidentally, the point at which I started trusting her. I’d chosen that seat deliberately after a series of lightning-fast calculations “sizing up” the physical space; calculations I didn’t think about because I thought everyone made them. I learned that contrary to my family’s assertions, I had actually learned to pay very close attention to the emotional weather in a room, watching people’s faces in sidelong glances and reacting with disproportionate caution or challenge to any hint of anger or disapproval–while always keeping an escape route in sight.

Anyway, cut to a few years earlier, when I was in massage school.

Slight digression here: Yes. You do have to go to school to get certified, though it’s been years since I practiced. The time I spent in massage school was fantastic, because it taught me a LOT–about boundaries, nonviolent dispute resolution, self-respect, the power of the mind and body. I wanted to do relaxation massage and found out I had a knack for treatment. The bodies just spoke to me, each in their own way, about how to help them heal themselves*.

In massage school, we practiced palpation. This is the art of identifying the structures under the skin. You have to accurately identify what’s under your fingers, elbows, wrists, forearms–because you can seriously hurt someone by messing about in, say, the cervical region. Or the abdomen.

Palpation was scary for each and every student. First, we were practicing on each other, so if you messed up (and the teachers scared us into caution) it was your classmate, someone you knew and saw every weekday. Then there was the whole thing about feeling stuff under the skin, which was thorny for a number of reasons. Last but certainly not least, there was the fact that you can’t feel a damn thing when you palpate for the first few thirty or fifty times.

That’s why studying your anatomy is so important. You have to have the mental idea of what should be under your touch. “Even if you can’t feel it,” one instructor remarked, “act like you do.” She paused, eyeing us. “In other words, fake it ’til you make it, baby.”

I was scandalised. Faking something as important as this? My expression must have shown it, and the other students looked shocked as well.

“It’s just the way palpation works,” the instructor said, not defensively at all. Rather, she was stating a simple fact. “You have to expect to feel what’s down there before you actually can. I think it’s your brain sorting out new ways to pattern the stimuli, but that’s just me. This way works. Trust me.”

Well, we did. We had no choice. And it was the damndest thing. Once you faked it for a little while, straining your brain to remember the structures under the skin, at some point something clicked. It was an almost physical “click”. You could see it happen to people. Their faces would light up, they would relax, and their entire posture changed.

It was the coolest thing to feel the “click” when someone was working on you. All of a sudden the touch would change. Instead of a hesitant, helpless prodding, all of a sudden the practitioner’s hands would drop down into your tissue and start dancing with the things under the skin, soothing almost before you could tell them where the ache was.

For me, the click just dropped everything into place. All of a sudden the person on the table wasn’t a just a collection of parts or a test or even a classmate. After that click, the instant I touched someone, I knew where they hurt.

I do not know whether this is a form of telepathy or the brain processing a huge amount of information in splits of split-seconds. I don’t care, either. As S. Jason Black once remarked, when I put my key in the ignition and the car starts for the thousandth time, coincidence is not relevant.

Trust me, this is wending toward a point.

Observation is something kids learn early. Our entire social conditioning rests on observing how other people are feeling.

Slight note: I do realize there are people who don’t. Inappropriate social behavior as a result of misreading cues or interpreting them incorrectly happens for a variety of reasons and in a variety of degrees, all of which are outside the purview of this essay. Don’t use that as a red herring, mmkay?

Where I’m going is simple. The first step toward becoming an observer is to realize that you have probably been doing this all your life, and you can sharpen those skills with very little effort. The next point is this: fake it ’til you make it, baby. This is the sort of endeavor that feels goddamn awkward at first until the “click” happens. After that, good luck turning it off–but that is, also, outside the purview of this little chat.

I had not realized that my hyperawareness of mood swings and likely danger in my childhood had affected my ability to observe people. I was amazed to find out that other people didn’t have a constant testing of the weather going on inside their heads. I was doubly amazed to find out other people didn’t constantly scan for signs of the next “explosion”. My therapist gently pointed out that I was always waiting for hammers that didn’t fall, and when I sensed someone was upset or angry, I immediately tried to anticipate what I could do to defuse the situation, trying strategy after strategy–and if the person didn’t respond in the ways I’d been conditioned to expect, I grew very nervous and fretted myself into a lather waiting for the storm.

The positive side of this, and an effect from my years as a massage therapist, was my instant sympathy with people I observed in public settings. The gift of the problem, as the Muffin would have called it, was that I was already a finely-tuned observer. I just had to turn that skill set toward the writing, which I did without even being aware of it. It was just like seeing someone walking by and knowing just by the way they moved that they’d had a knee injury, and then running over possible ways of treating it inside my head.

Palpation will do that to you. *rolls eyes*

I sense I’m digressing and getting boring here. But a lot of what I’m about to recommend will make little sense unless I first explained the principles behind why I think these things work. I can separate the art of un-obnoxious observation out into two parts: common courtesy and the actual skills.

Common Courtesy

I suggest observation in public places. First of all, a brightly-lit public place is less dangerous. There is also a social compact in place in public places–as long as you are obeying the “rules of the road” you are well-nigh invisible and can watch what you want. Also, the places I recommend are usually full of people going about their business and too busy to wonder about you.

Shopping Malls: These are like museums in action. Cultural assumptions, family and social dynamics, expectations of anonymity and proper behavior, and cross-sections of society, all available, and at very low cost.
Libraries/Museums: Less traffic, but the people are often weirder. Also relatively low-cost.
Casinos/Racetracks: Really I don’t recommend racetracks, but Bukowski loved them. These are higher-cost and a bad idea if you have addiction issues. They’re only available for people of a certain age, but they are full of human nature on display.
Coffee shops/street cafes: These can be slightly higher-cost too, but they give the advantage of watching two spheres at once–inside the restaurant space and outside on the street.
Grocery/Convenience Stores: When you’re out shopping or filling your tank, you have a golden opportunity to observe people. These differ from the above in that they’re dictated by your needs and you can’t loiter endlessly.
Fairs/Granges For the rural-living, look around. Humans are endlessly social and there is bound to be some place where people hang out. I am an urban creature, and I am most familiar by now with American urban spaces. My apologies–all I can tell the rural writer is that there’s bounds to be somewhere people get together to chew the fat. Suggestions in the comments are welcome. (I leave observation of Nature for another blog post.)

These spaces are treasure troves for the writer. But you need to follow a few rules.

Stay out of the way. Malls are my first choice because you can buy a coffee or something, sit on one of the benches or in the food court, and watch for literally hours. In casinos, the expectations are different–if you’re in a lounge or just wandering around, you may need to have a soft drink or something. It’s your rent for being in that space. You also have to know the rules operating around gambling tables, or the casino can ask you not to come back. Coffee shops need their tables after a reasonable amount of time, unless they’re in a slow period. So do restaurants. A little courtesy toward the space itself goes a long way.

I’ve had a lot of luck in restaurants by simply saying, “I’m going to be here a little while. If you get busy I’ll move on. Is there a place I can sit and have a cup of coffee that’s out of your way?” while holding up my notebook with a hopeful smile. A little courtesy goes a long, long way; waiters and waitresses are more than willing to let me sit and nurse a coffee for a long time. They’ll make small talk and tell me about their lives and the restaurant biz. I always make a point of tipping very well. Coffee is cheap, and the couple dollars in extra tipping buys me goodwill next time. I’ve even had some joints spot me the coffee because the staff enjoys the sensation of being listened to, of being important. Don’t take advantage of this–goodwill is hard-bought and easily lost. If you’re asked to move on, do it. There are always other spaces.

Don’t stare. Take a notebook with you and jot down sentences. If you look like you’re writing, the curious will largely leave you alone. This is excellent exercise. It will also give you a reason to glance up, take in the atmosphere, study something or someone, and then glance back down. Staring at someone in a public space can get you labeled as creepy, attract the attention of security people who have other things to look out for, or can be interpreted as a challenge. Besides, it’s rude. If you are taking advantage of the social compact in a public space, you need to observe it.

Rules And Skills

Listen, listen, listen. I repeat this one because few people truly listen. They are too busy planning the next thing they’re going to say inside their heads. Listening in public places will give you an ear for how people really talk–what they say, what they don’t say, how tone interacts with volume and emphasis to give context. You could do far worse things than learning to listen.

Pay attention, Part I. Don’t focus on horking up a masterpiece in your notebook. Rather, jot fragments. Go for the telling detail. Don’t worry if it makes no sense to you later. This is not an exercise in writing for sense. This is Grist For The Mill. You are giving yourself a glut of stimuli so you can get to that “click”. Don’t stint yourself.

Pay attention, Part II. Don’t do this in public parks after dark. Don’t scribble in your notebook while hanging over a poker table. Don’t be so involved in scribbling in your notebook you walk out in front of a car. Don’t stare at the couple having a disagreement or give a dirty look to the howling kid and the overstressed mother. Don’t make challenging eye contact with a group of punks with nothing better to do. Exercise some caution with your own safety.

A note here: I’ve some of disobeyed my own advice, mostly when I was young and stupid and hanging out in bad, bad parts of town. I don’t recommend it. Really I don’t.

Detachment? There are a few different schools of thought about this. Should you be a disinterested, dispassionate observer–as far as you can be? Should you allow the cruelty and pointlessness that you may see–and believe me, you WILL see plenty–to “get to you”? Should you make judgments about what you see?

It’s up to you. Write to answer those questions, if you must. But in the end, it’s up to you.

Time yourself. You can get overstimulated really easily. This can also become a timesuck used to distract yourself from actually writing. Set yourself a time limit and stick to it. I recommend a half-hour to start with, once a week.

The “What-If game”. When I was about nine a blinding realization struck me. Every car we passed on the freeway was inhabited by people who had completely different lives. What if the guy in the red Honda was really a government spy? What if that lady in the truck was the world’s greatest horse trainer but nobody knew it? What if, what if, what if?

I’ve never grown out of the habit.

This is part of what I mean when I say “stories are lying all around.” It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of watching people before the what-ifs start flopping around in your head, begging for some attention.

Unobtrusive and un-obnoxious observation depends on obeying the social compact and politeness toward the space. Once you get practiced at observing people in public spaces, a funny thing happens: a part of your brain steps back and starts observing people all the time. I call this “writer brain”–the part of me constantly taking notes. It becomes a kneejerk reaction, like looking under the “hood” of a car to see what makes it work–or not work.

Sometimes I wish I could turn it off. The dark side of it is that I have very few times where I simply sink into the moment and be. The irony is twofold: most people have very few such times, thousands of dollars are spent on simulacra**; and those times when I sink into the moment most completely and just “am”, I’m generally…writing.

I know there is a divine presence out there somewhere, if only because of little ironies like that.

My problem is something opposite of Cat’s above. My childhood hyperawareness rarely lets me observe without feeling anxious and looking for the next explosion. It’s gotten better now that I have the words to describe the process and familiarity with it, and channeled it toward writing. But that was something I had to learn in massage school too–how not to take on a client’s pain. You can call it “boundaries” if you want, and having a tender heart or strung-tight nerves can make observation a terrifying experience–which is why I recommend timing yourself. You are engaged in not only watching other people, but watching your own responses, thoughts, judgments and the like. It is hard to stare into the mirror of humanity without seeing yourself reflected–both good and bad.

Well, I went and got philosophical and wrote a monster of a post. I’m tired now, so I think I’ll bring it to a close. Cat, I hope this answers some of your question–and the question was far more complex than I think either of us realized. *eyes post* I think I went rushing in there where angels fear to tread.

I suppose if one’s going to be a writer, a healthy dose of such rushing is probably inherent in one’s makeup. The labyrinth of the human heart is not to be walked lightly. On the other hand, I have rarely been so endlessly amused as when I’ve been watching the vast cavalcade and panorama of my fellow beings. I find them endlessly interesting.

Which is, I suppose, why I ended up in this job…

…but that’s another blog post. *wink*

* I firmly believe that a majority of the time, the body just needs a little help to sort things out. It’s not healing the body, it’s helping the body heal itself. All standard disclaimers to this opinion apply, since I am not currently a medical professional.
** To list just a few: drugs, self-help books, trend-of-the-moment “meditation” classes, video games, compulsive shopping–need I go on?

Related posts:

1. Permission To Create “Bad” Art
2. Life and Art
3. The Deliberate Art, and Bureaucracy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Real Life, Writing (About). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.