Why Invention?
Writing involves a great deal of personal ingenuity. You must see the world clearly and participate in it imaginatively.
Observing
Only noticing things that most affect you leads to thin development, sketchy generalizations and excessive subjectivity.
Expand your perceptual vocabulary:
Can “green” apply to the sky? On many late afternoons, the whole Western horizon is a band of vibrating green where the yellow of the sun blends with the blue of the evening.
Can you conceive the sky metaphorically? A sea of air
Experience
Insightful experience depend less on literal seeing and doing, and more on awareness and imagination.
Heroic first-person stories tend fall to cliches, bragging and subjectivity.
Your objective as a writer is have prose so vivid that the reader has a vicarious experience themselves. Consider a bystander persona if appropriate.
Reading
Read to extend beyond your personal encounters. Reading also bestows more perceptual vocabulary.
Speculating
Except in definite cases, e.g. human welfare, prefer a selection of the facts. Try possibility B, even if it means stretching X and ignoring Y.
Divide the material into any natural lines, e.g. American taste from 1945 - 1970 in terms of the dominant colors of the day.
Make new connections e.g. the straight line and human culture.
Beautiful Writing: Updike, John - Central Park
The gutters were still heaped high with Monday’s snow but the sky itself was swept clean.
Everybody laughed except Youngster, who sniffled.
Twelve snowmen, none of them intact.
The Michael Friedsam Foundation Merry-Go-Round, nearly empty of children, but brimful of calliope music.
The green head of Giuseppe Mazzini staring across the white softball field, unblinking, though the sun was in its eyes.
Footprints around a “KEEP OFF” sign.
Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.
An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore.
Exercises
Imagine that you’re synesthetic: describe the sound of an odor, or the feel of a color
Make an exhaustive list of the attributes of the most commonplace object in sight.
Describe emotion using sufficient detail, without explicitly mentioning the emotion.
Doesn’t sound like good advice. A juicy albeit incomplete story isn’t worth it. Nonetheless, I should be wary about writers doing this.