Sam Apple\u00a0(samapple.com)<\/a> is the author of the new book\u00a0Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection. It\u2019s the story of a brilliant scientist in Nazi Germany and how the rediscovery of his long-lost metabolism research is fundamentally changing the way we think about cancer.\u00a0The book emerged from a piece Sam wrote for\u00a0The New York Times Magazine\u00a0in 2016<\/em>. An exclusive, unpublished excerpt from that article\u00a0appeared on this very blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n His work has appeared in\u00a0The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired,\u00a0the\u00a0Los Angeles Times, Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, MIT Technology Review,\u00a0and\u00a0McSweeney\u2019s<\/em>, among many other publications.\u00a0Sam teaches science\u00a0writing and creative writing\u00a0at Johns Hopkins University.<\/p>\n What follows is a short guest post from Sam on how better noticing can make you become a better writer, including writing exercises to help you develop your own noticing powers.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> When I tell people I teach a class at Johns Hopkins on \u201cnoticing,\u201d they\u2019re often surprised and a little confused. Noticing doesn\u2019t sound like something that needs to be taught\u2014let alone in a graduate writing program. It begins to make a little\u00a0more sense, I hope, when I explain that the course is called \u201cNoticing as a Writer\u201d and that noticing in the way of a writer is different from the ordinary noticing we all do each day.<\/p>\n So what does it mean to \u201cnotice as a writer\u201d? I like to define it as \u201cthe combination of close observation and insightfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div> Close observation is easy enough to grasp.\u00a0Let\u2019s take an example: As I\u2019m typing this sentence, I might look down and notice my hands moving over my keyboard. That\u2019s \u201cnoticing\u201d in the ordinary sense of the word\u2014what you might think of as \u201cfirst-order noticing.\u201d To notice my typing hands in the way of a writer, I have to be far more specific. I might notice the rhythmic rise and fall of my knuckles or how the tendons on the back of my hand bulge and twitch with each keystroke. I might notice how some keys are almost silent while others respond to my fingertips with a pronounced\u2014and somehow satisfying\u2014clack.<\/p>\n Or I might notice a hundred other things. There is not one correct thing to notice about typing hands or anything else. For the writer, the aim is to notice in a way that makes the object of the noticing feel suddenly new, suddenly more interesting than it has any right to be. It\u2019s not unlike how a good photographer can take a good photograph of almost anything by finding the right lens and lighting and angle. I sometimes describe the process as \u201cseeking the extraordinary in the ordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take an example from one of the greatest noticers in history,\u00a0David Foster Wallace<\/a>. In his famous commencement speech, \u201cThis is Water\u201d\u2014which is about the power of noticing\u2014Foster Wallace recounts the experience of going to a grocery store on a stressful day.<\/p>\n![\"How](\"https:\/\/calepin.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/16838790251_8d68f1355f_o-400x267.jpg\")
*Originally published on The Tim Ferriss Blog<\/a><\/em>*<\/p>\nEnter Sam…<\/h2><\/div>
Close Observation<\/h3><\/div>