How to Add Mindfulness to Your Writer’s Toolbox

5 simple ways to get started

A few years ago I took over as Game Master for a Pathfinder campaign, which is similar to Dungeons & Dragons. To prep for each game session, I started colouring maps and painting detailed miniatures, many of which are about as tall as your ring finger. I hunched over them for hours with a brush that often had no more than 10 wispy bristles.

Then I’d take my dog for a walk, to stretch out and get moving. The colours and textures and contrasts in the world exploded into life around me. Do you know how many different shades of grey and brown there are in the cracks of your ordinary tree bark? The sunlight strokes one narrow line into bronze while the shadows swallow and mute the creases into charcoal.

The highlights and shadings and shadows had always been there, but I couldn’t really see them until I tried to paint them. And until I could see them, how could I ever use them to season my stories?

Mindfulness is about discovering the things you never noticed were always there.

There are plenty of incredible, accurate articles out there on the importance of vividly describing or suggestively evoking the senses in writing. But all that is moot if you haven’t immersed yourself in vivid, multi-sensory experiences. Mindfulness is a way of checking in with your senses to make sure they are all-systems go.

Mindfulness ensures that as you move through your already rich and varied life, you’re picking up all the details like a Dyson V11 Absolute — sucking them in, storing them for future reference. Going out and having new experiences is great, imagining them — fantastic! But unless you’re zero’d in on the textures and frequencies and fragrances around you, your senses, and by extension your writing, will mostly be bouncing off the surfaces of life.

Here are 5 simple ways to amp up your sensors:

1. Create A Sensory Test

My mindfulness teacher likes to say that one square of chocolate is more enjoyable than a whole chocolate bar. Why? Because after a few small bites, most of us stop actually tasting. A different part of our brain takes over, and the sensations fuzz out. We’re still masticating and swallowing but we’re no longer experiencing.

Think of this as wine tasting. Starting with food or drink is often the easiest, though it’s a good idea to practice when you aren’t actually hungry or thirsty.

You could experiment with beer or sweaters or the leaves of different plants. Scarves or flowers or cups — whatever is at hand, or whatever you are curious to learn more about.

• Choose a half dozen options
• Try them slowly, one by one
• Use as many senses as you can. Maybe the key to knowing everything about a sweater lies in actually giving it a lick — your tongue is your most sensitive organ, after all.
• The point here is to experience, but take notes if that is helpful

Observing the contrast between things that are “the same” but actually quite different will help them to stand out more clearly. The weight of each beer matters as it rolls in your mouth. House paint has at least 5 different “sheens” because each one creates a different effect. No detail is too small to be meaningful, cleverly used.

2. Practice Another Art (Preferably Like a Beginner)

The example I offered above about learning to paint minis is just one way to branch out into other arts. It doesn’t matter what art you chose, because each one will get you looking at the world from another angle. Each one has a unique way of witnessing what you may never have otherwise known.

In her landmark book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards admits that her “true subject is perception.”

In teaching people how to draw, she writes,

the larger underlying purpose was always to bring right hemisphere functions into focus and to teach readers how to see in new ways, with hopes that they would discover how to transfer perceptual skills to thinking and problem solving.

Other arts that might help train your perceptual thinking:

• Music
• Dance
• Drama
• Sculpture
• Ceramics
• Gardening

In an attempt to recreate myself as an Elizabethan heroine, I tried my hand at embroidery this past winter. I’m not by nature tuned into the fine details (my fatal flaw as a writer is undoubtedly the typo) so the meticulousness required by teeny tiny threads stitched into diaphanous cloth made me wonder whether I had unconsciously self-imposed an ancient form of torture.

And yet. The concentration required was soothing and the delight in watching a shape emerge helped me better understand (and respect!) not only experts in embroidery but art forms from pointillism to high level chef-ery. It forced me to slow down so I could see how tiny parts of a composition line up to create a whole.

3. Pick a Wake-up Bell

Eventually we transfer our mindfulness skills to our everyday lives, so we can ransack our most quotidian of experiences. The hardest part can be breaking the inertia of our thoughts and activities, which keep us rolling on without realizing we’re on autopilot. The wake-up bell is a reminder to pay attention to the present moment and what is actually going on.

In a Buddhist temple, it is literally a bell, rung at intervals. The monks stop and check in whether they are eating or crapping or weeding the garden.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh describes it thusly:

Sometimes our bodies may be home, but we’re not truly home. Our mind is elsewhere. The bell can help bring the mind back to the body.

What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What am I feeling? Am I aware or half asleep at the wheel?

Getting started, you might actually set a timer on your phone to go off every 15–20 minutes. Each time it goes off, take three conscious breaths. Scan your internal state. Observe your surroundings. Where are you at?

If you’re reluctant to set a timer, use a sound you hear relatively often, but one that you don’t easily tune out. The buzzer for your condo building. The crosswalk beeper. The ping on your phone for a text — if you can resist looking at it immediately. It just needs to be something that will help you break the inertia of not noticing.

Maybe you’ll get so much out of this you’ll take it to the next level and pause between each small action: what Joe Moody calls “The Pause Challenge”.

4. Stretch Your Sense Muscles

At least 2–3 times a day, check in with all your senses. Head-to-toe, no-holds-barred, what are you experiencing on every level?

So you’re sitting on a bench in the park. Where do the wooden slats press into your bum and your back? Is it painted? Peeling? What kind of graffiti is carved in or scribbled on?

Do your feet dangle? Are your knees splayed or your legs crossed? How does your posture jive or clash with your emotional state?

What are the sounds you hear: near by and far off? Are there birds? How many different calls can you distinguish? How many words or metaphors can you hear in the way the wind tickles the trees?

Is the taste of your peppermint toothpaste still furry on your tongue? Or perhaps you’re sipping an Americano, still so hot the steam slips into your mouth the moment before the bitter liquid and it whispers of chocolate and Peruvian mountains.

5. Watch How Your Body Reacts to a Variety of Emotions

I was talking with my therapist the other night and told her about the connection I’ve noticed between getting angry and my body temperature. I get mad=I get hot. She was surprised and said she’d never heard that before; I was surprised that it was news to her.

My toddler is the same way. Two minutes into being upset and you could cook an egg on that girl’s head. It’s like trying to cuddle and comfort a fireball.

It also works in reverse: if I get too hot I start to lose my temper. Now this is very important information when it comes to being a better human, but it’s also a valuable insight into how characters might experience or reveal their own inner worlds.

Maybe they notice the bodily sensation of loneliness, unaware of the emotion bubbling just below. Maybe you use this to show your readers that someone is blissful, rather than simply telling them.

But until you sink into your own full-body sorrow — limbs relentlessly tethered to the earth, a head hollowed-out with tears, skin that sizzles like an empty griddle — it’s hard to imagine, never mind describe, the sensory impact of the experience.

The point of accumulating sensory information is not necessarily to create a 20 page descriptive monologue of the moment a la Tolstoy, but to take in as much as you can — and then winnow it down to the essential. What is genuinely significant? What is oddly out of sync?

You stand at the sink washing dishes while your family clatter and clash in the next room. If you could paint the moment using only two economical, haiku-like brushstrokes, which ones capture it perfectly? You might be surprised.

But how to get this vial information?

• taste-test life
• try another art
• choose a bell of mindfulness
• stretch your senses
• full-body feel your feelings

With mindfulness, you can invent a novel combination of words for the precise moment in time you wish to write. You already feel it waiting, there in your body.