Looking Around:
"Looking around" sounds like being the fly on the wall. For a writer, being the fly on the wall is to not have judgements about others, but to see them as they are (not what you think). You look at what they say, how they behave, etc without assigning right or wrong to it. Lamott describes how to achieve this; "Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others."
Broccoli:
Lamott is using broccoli as a metaphor from a quote she heard. Broccoli represents our intuition or inner voice and if we're stuck in writing out our characters, we need to quiet ourselves and listen to our "broccoli." Lamott writes, "Let's say it's only 9:15; now, if you were to stick it out, the image or situation might come to you that would wedge the door open for a character, after which you would only have to get out of the way. Because then the character could come forward and speak and might say something important it might even be the thing that it most important to him or her, and your plot might suddenly fall into place."
Letter:
"The letter's informality," says Lamott, "just might free you from the tyranny of perfectionism." That is the power of writing out your own or your character's history. It gets you going as you aren't publishing a novel, just writing a letter. "Some of the best pieces to come out of my classes have been written by people who wanted to tell their children about their own childhoods, or about their children's childhoods, what the years were like just before these children were born and then after, in that first house the family lived in, down the hill from the little white church, or about those years in the Peace Corps, in that tiny wild brilliant African village, or what it was like to work on a whaling ship in the forties." This prompt/format for writing can be sloppy, so it makes room for all the sensory detail and situations to arise. Then you can use this to write your story or add to a preexisting one.
"Looking around" sounds like being the fly on the wall. For a writer, being the fly on the wall is to not have judgements about others, but to see them as they are (not what you think). You look at what they say, how they behave, etc without assigning right or wrong to it. Lamott describes how to achieve this; "Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others."
Broccoli:
Lamott is using broccoli as a metaphor from a quote she heard. Broccoli represents our intuition or inner voice and if we're stuck in writing out our characters, we need to quiet ourselves and listen to our "broccoli." Lamott writes, "Let's say it's only 9:15; now, if you were to stick it out, the image or situation might come to you that would wedge the door open for a character, after which you would only have to get out of the way. Because then the character could come forward and speak and might say something important it might even be the thing that it most important to him or her, and your plot might suddenly fall into place."
Letter:
"The letter's informality," says Lamott, "just might free you from the tyranny of perfectionism." That is the power of writing out your own or your character's history. It gets you going as you aren't publishing a novel, just writing a letter. "Some of the best pieces to come out of my classes have been written by people who wanted to tell their children about their own childhoods, or about their children's childhoods, what the years were like just before these children were born and then after, in that first house the family lived in, down the hill from the little white church, or about those years in the Peace Corps, in that tiny wild brilliant African village, or what it was like to work on a whaling ship in the forties." This prompt/format for writing can be sloppy, so it makes room for all the sensory detail and situations to arise. Then you can use this to write your story or add to a preexisting one.
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