If you teach creative writing, you may have faced it. A student stalks through the door before class, chin forward like Reese Witherspoon motoring through the hallways in Election.

We might as well call the student Reese. After slinging into a chair, Reese tells you that someone in the class is going to steal the essence of a short story she’s supposed to hand in, the story being brilliant and the classroom teeming with plagiarists. 

She knows it’s going to happen. It’s all in R.F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface, and her classmates are —Reese hates to say it—scheming second-rate wannabes eager to steal the story that’s the best thing she’s ever written and can’t I please change the class format to fix this. 

Maybe I’m exaggerating just a little. But many students in writing courses worry about their work being plagiarized by classmates. If you’ve faced that problem—as an instructor or a student—here’s the first step I’ve taken to deal with peoples’ worries when teaching both fiction and screenwriting.

• Okay, class. Spot exercise. Grab your coats, your phone or a pen and notebook, if you’ve got a pen and notebook the way I’ve repeatedly suggested. We’re going to spend 20 minutes walking around campus together, or head to the local mall. Your job is to notice what’s going on and write it down. Maybe the way a couple of people are acting toward each other, maybe the quality of light. You might scribble down an overheard phrase or describe something that triggers a memory. Then we’re going to come back to the classroom and everybody is going to write a paragraph based on one thing they saw. 

Guess what? The paragraphs always ended up being entirely different, even though I’d played sheepdog during our walk, making sure everybody stayed close together so they would see the same things. Maybe one student would riff off a couple having a silent argument, a pair none of the other students had noticed. Maybe another guy would see a woman who reminded him of his elementary school teacher, sending him back to a liminal moment in Grade 4. 

Even if several people wrote about something more dramatic—a prof falling off his bicycle, a security guard racing toward a building—the paragraphs would be different in detail and tone. Sometimes the prof’s fall would be comic, sometimes plangent. 

What am I getting at here?

Reese usually got my point. People see the world differently, and what they see triggers individual memories and unpredictable connections. Even if someone were to steal her idea—which I’ve never caught anyone doing—the ways they’d individualize it (and try to disguise it) would make it into a very different piece. 

It’s also true that seeing something that speaks to you, even on a stroll around campus, is a good way to get started on work that’s truly your own.

It’s Step One, anyway, and I often do it on my own, heading out for walks when I need a break and scribbling notes when something piques my interest. Maybe it’s the guy playing the blues on his guitar in front of the credit union, or the exhausted-looking man and woman pushing triplets divided between two strollers, a pair of babies in one, a singleton in the other—glimpses I might later throw into my writing to add specificity, the way I did just did. 

But there’s also something else, isn’t there? Something deeper. 

Step Two

As Socrates says, the unexamined life isn’t worth living. The unexamined notebook isn’t worth keeping, either. I’ve always written a journal, something else I advise. Every three or four weeks, I pull out my notebook and copy the vignettes I’ve seen into the journal, the ones that still strike me. (Not everything does.) 

I also write about other things I’ve been doing, concentrating on the doing rather than my feelings, since we’re not talking therapy. What books did I pick up lately? What detail did someone drop about their job? When meeting a friend for coffee at a patisserie, what did we see? (The woman at the next table, laptop open in front of her, listening to every word we said.) 

Then comes the big question: Why did this particular moment interest me so much and not the thousand other things going on around it? 

There was the time earlier this year, for example, when I bought the memoir Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton instead of a novel I’d gone to the bookstore to buy. I hadn’t planned to read a memoir about a woman rescuing a baby hare during the pandemic lockdown. So why pick it up?  

And look: while writing about Dalton’s book in my journal, I began riffing about the time, also during Covid, when a rabbit turned up in our garden in the middle of the city, ears rising above the hostas. 

Why am I spending so much time thinking about the lockdown six years later? 

There’s an important answer to that question

What I’m doing here is something I call noticing what you notice, and I find it crucial to zeroing in on what truly interests me. Or, to put it another way, in identifying my material.

It’s tempting to give in to trends. Maybe you’re worried that the market wants you to turn the historical novel you’re writing into a romantasy, or wondering whether to abandon the manuscript entirely and try your hand at speculative fiction. Or, since you’re broke, maybe you should trying writing a novel featuring lesbian hockey players.

But what does your check-in with your journal say? If you notice that you’ve been downloading nothing but romantasy novels lately, not out of any market-based worries but because you enjoy them, maybe you should go ahead and sprinkle some pixie dust into that historical novel you’ve been struggling with. It might bring the book alive. 

Yet if Heated Rivalry leaves you cold, you’re not going to engage readers by cramming your characters’ feet into skates. People can pick up fake enthusiasm a mile away, and rote writing. 

What does this practice look like in real life?

For the past year and a half, most of the stories I’ve posted both here and on my Substack newsletter have grown out of my research for the novel I was writing. Reviews of books I read as background to the events in the manuscript, personal stories about visits I made to, say, Korean spas. 

At the same time, I mined my journals for details that would enrich the narrative.

Yet over the past few months, with the novel almost finished, the pieces have grown more random. I wrote about cats because my old cat Archie died; about Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet and the Oscar-winning movie it inspired because I liked them; about a novel set partly among the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua because my husband, a former foreign correspondent, was kidnapped by the Contras.

Except—there was something going on there under the surface, at least sometimes. My next project will be a novella based on one of the secondary characters in the novel I’ve just finished writing. As I turn my attention to the novella, I’ve begun to review both the newsletters and my journal, searching for themes running through my recent reading, and taking a hard look at the sights and experiences I’ve chosen to write down. 

I doubt the pastry shop will play a part in the novella, although I might have to go back for further research before ruling it out. Yet now that I think about it, I’ve been writing a lot about pandemics lately, not just the Covid of Raising Hare, but the bubonic plague that’s central to Hamnet.

Why?

Maybe it’s because the novella will be a ghost story, and a story about a ghost is going to involve both incomprehension and isolation. Feeling lost. Pandemics tend to make you feel that way. At least, that’s how I felt during the Covid lockdowns, and I’m starting to see how revisiting those long months of confinement is going to prove useful in developing my story. 

And that woman eavesdropping in the patisserie? Ghosts eavesdrop, don’t they? 

It’s strange to understand why you’ve read something only after you’ve finished reading it, and to realize weeks later why you spent so much time thinking about the woman at the next table in the pastry shop instead of giving your undivided attention to your friend. 

Yet my ideas for books tend to begin as vague thoughts that only slowly come into focus, and I find that noticing what I notice is an enormous help in getting there.

Maybe it could help you, too. If so: 

• Enjoy yourself. Challenge yourself. Go to new places and meet up with old friends. Read, take out your earbuds and listen, and always pay close attention to what’s going on around you. (It’s a recipe for an interesting life even if it doesn’t help your writing.)
• Take notes. Describe those triplets divided between two strollers. The posture of their exhausted parents. Get very particular about the way your fourth grade teacher was reincarnated in a rando woman you saw that time your weird teacher made you walk around campus. 
• Afterward, try to work out why the details you’ve noticed are important to you and your writing. What made you focus on the prof falling off his bicycle and not the security guard racing into the building? Examine the moment. Dive into it. Go deep.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll have a project no one can plagiarize. It’s rooted too deeply in your unique way of seeing the world.

That includes plagiarism by AI models, by the way. It’s a bigger topic and a huge worry. Yet AI can only copy and recombine the data it scrapes, not experience the world as sensually and individually as we can, nor dig into memories of its fourth-grade teacher in unexpected ways. 

It’s what we’ve got, so we’d better use it. 

Start now. 

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You can read my story about Korean spas here.

About my husband’s kidnapping in this review of Giaime Alonge’s novel, The Feeling of Iron.

And my review of both the book and movie versions of Hamnet here.

Meanwhile, please visit my Substack, Alive to the World.

School hallway photo credit Caleb Oquando

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This post originally appeared on the website of publishing guru Jane Friedman. For people who might have read it there (and, well, anyone) I’m offering a free download today of the ebook of one of my novels. The Corner Garden. 

In The Corner Garden, we meet Jessie Barfoot, aged 15. She’s precocious, witty and wounded, her standards too high for ordinary life. In this moving novel, Jessie befriends a Dutch refugee from World War II whose secrets threaten them both.

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And have a look at Jane Friedman’s website here.