Writing is Mostly Seeing

det at digte det er væsentligt at se

I saw it on a wall in a museum in Trondheim, Norway in 2001. Just a quote, rendered in Norwegian with the English translation underneath. No indication of source, although I've since seen it attributed to Ibsen, Voltaire, or Ibsen quoting Voltaire. 

I took a picture of it--this was in the last dying days of film photography--because I remembered thinking, "Yep, that's it." It wasn't as if I hadn't already heard this before. I'd been writing creatively for long enough to know that seeing is one of the main activities of the writer. It was the "mostly" that stuck with me. 

Mostly. How bold. There are so many things that writing could be called: creation, effort, editing, doubt, celebration, art. . . . Seeing? Mostly seeing. That struck something in me.

It's interesting because I deplore adverbs most of the time. I teach my students to avoid adverbs, they're just window-dressing on a week verb. Frequency adverbs are the worst because whenever you say "never" or "always" the person you say it to will cock their head and ask: "Really? Never?"

But this one was right. Writing is mostly seeing. Writers are aesthetists in that we watch and appreciate the world and that we synthesize and disseminate the information the world provides us. We thumb through our mental or our literal notes, and we use what we have watched to help us create. 

Writers are students of humanity. 

I have a copy of that photo from May 2001 on the wall in front of me. I want to see it every time I sit down to write. I scrawl this quote at the beginning of each of my journals. When I teach a writing class, it always appears at the top of the syllabus (Often accompanied by "Murder your darlings" and "When in doubt leave it out.") I want to remember that, I want my students to remember it.

Writers cannot create by closeting themselves off in some dark room devoid of sensation and human contact. The created world needs to be inspired by the existing world. For art to imitate life, art must watch and know life, because the reason art exists is to tell life more about itself.

This is why as writers we must go out and see, because writing is mostly seeing.