“Sara sat in the coffee shop and sipped her drink.” Eh. I’ll end with this. I didn’t think that you could make sipping coffee any more detailed than this. I shrugged and showed my writeup to my writing professor.
“So Sara just sipped coffee? That’s it?”
I looked at her with the embarrassment of a novice, a really bad one at that.
She didn’t say anything except for a “Hmm” and waited for all of us to complete our writeups. Then she coughed and cleared her throat and told us to go to the cafeteria. “Try to really listen listen. Observe your surroundings. Pay attention to each and every sound, sight, anything that you eat and write it down. Take as long as you like, but come back in 20 minutes.”
I was excited. This was my first formal writing class and I was eager to impress my professor.
I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sounds. Slippers clapping against the floor, someone whispered an inaudible question and snickered softly. Slurping of smoothies, gross. I strained my ears and tried to make out conversations. Tones. Pitches. All of these I wrote. Then I really looked at my peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich and chewed the creamy peanut butter mixed with tart, sweet jam sandwiched between two crumbly layers of wholewheat bread…
