We live in an incredible, incredible world. There’s so much going on at all times: new things to learn, new things to try, new things to see. As a human being and especially as a writer, it’s pretty much your job to be interested. We write stories that portray facets of the world, whether through truth or fiction, and the moment we lose interest in what we’re portraying is the moment it becomes boring for everyone involved.

We have to We GET to stay curious about the world all the time. Interested eyes are going to spot details and nuances that uninterested eyes will miss.

Be curious. Be almost outright nosy. What’s going on around you? How do you relate to it? How would you relay it to others? Did you see something old in a new way? Did you see something new, and for some reason it felt familiar?

There are lots of ways to trigger that curiosity, and I’m going to hit a few of my favorites.

Deprive yourself of one of your senses. This was a writing exercise I used to do in high school. The easiest sense to deprive yourself of is vision, so that was a quick go-to. I would take an object I was familiar with, or go to a place I was familiar with, blindfold myself, and then describe the object/place/person with only the remaining senses. And you can’t fall back on memory for this. Make yourself access the object/person/place in a way that you normally don’t.

If you would typically describe your favorite food through taste and smell, now you have to describe it through texture and temperature. If you always describe people by hair and eye color, now you have to describe them through scent and aura (or taste and smell, I guess, but don’t just go around sniffing and licking people who didn’t consent to it!).

We all have fallbacks that we use for description. By removing one of your senses, you ask yourself to experience something differently in order to describe it differently.

Take a class in something new. Nowhere in my near future will I forget the experience that was my first cycling class. This was over a decade ago, long before I got into fitness seriously, and I still remember the suffering, the sweat, the endorphins high. It was horrifying and glorious simultaneously. Parts of my body I barely knew existed were on fire.

Did I go write a book about cycling? No, of course not. But I connected to my body in an entirely new way, and that gave me language and experience that I would use to write many different scenes in many different books for years afterward.

Over the years, I’ve taken random classes in printing, dancing, yoga, and teaching theory that have nothing to do with my ordinary life, and I’m the richer for it. Be nosy. Ask all the questions. What does the art studio of a college student look like? What do the women wear to salsa class on a Thursday night? How did your middle school English teacher learn how to connect with students over fiction?

Variety adds richness, and that one-off detail you picked up while learning how to make apple cider at the fall festival might be exactly what you need to add that richness to a character.

Hang out with someone you don’t like. Now, don’t tell the person what you’re doing. No need to hurt feelings. We could also adjust this to hang out with someone you wouldn’t normally hang out with. I firmly believe that a lot of people don’t get along simply because we make assumptions about each other; we play too much fill-in-the-blank when it comes to them as a person, and in essence we create our own enemy.

But people are far more complicated than the cardboard cutout we make of them, and you might be surprised by what you learn – about them and about yourself – when you take the time to get to know them.

Part of writing a 3D cast of characters is highlighting the differences between them. If you only spend time with people you love or who are just like you, not only will you be boring (yes, I said it) but your writing will be boring, too, because those will be the only types of people you’re able to write about.

One of my favorite writing-related compliments I’ve ever received was when people told me, “I don’t know how I feel about Tessan,” who is the maybe-villain, maybe-hero of A Landscape of Shadows. And I love that. Because he’s supposed to be someone who’s complicated enough that you could hate him or you could love him, and everyone is going to fall somewhere different on the spectrum based on their own personalities.

Tessan was a much flatter character in the first few drafts of the book, until I started getting really curious about what the heck was actually going on in his brain.

There is too much going on in the world, in people, and in nature for us to be satisfied with what we already know. Get out there. Get curious. And then get writing.