Seeing the Full Frame

I never leave home without my phone—aka my camera. And if I do, I invariably regret it.

Today, I saw magenta and orange bougainvillea exploding over walls. An orchid tree in full bloom. A canopy of green so dense it turned the street into a tunnel of shade.

It struck me—again—that writing has very little to do with sitting at a desk waiting for sentences to behave. It’s about noticing. Taking in detail visually, aurally, physically.

Training the eye and ear long before my fingers tap the keyboard.

That was one of the cornerstones of the Eat Write Roam workshops when they first took shape. More than lectures on structure or how to build characters, we designed experiential exercises that pushed writers into the streets—asking them to observe how light falls on stone, how conversations overlap in a café, how people move... or don’t.

San Miguel makes that easy. People mingle, linger. Beauty is everywhere. Almost aggressively so.

But I was reminded today that beauty, on its own, is never the full story.

Years ago, I was walking along a beach in Bali. The sunset was extraordinary—the kind people build entire travel myths around. The ocean was calm. The light unreal. I remember thinking how lucky I was to be standing there.

Then I looked down.

There was a dead dog on the sand.

Its teeth were viciously bared. And then I noticed its paws were tied.

The shock wasn’t just the brutality of it. It was the collision. The impossibility of holding those two truths at once: astonishing beauty and absolute horror occupying the same frame.

That moment has never left me. Not because it was sensational, but because it was instructive.

This is what keen observation teaches you. Not how to aestheticize the world, but how to tolerate contradiction. How to hold polarity without flinching. How to notice what you’d rather edit out.

And that matters for writing.

Because stories don’t live in purity. They live in tension. In what doesn’t belong together but exists anyway. Love next to cruelty. Grace beside decay. Humor brushing up against grief.

What feels pronounced in the collective consciousness right now—the sharpness, the volatility, the sense of extremes—isn’t new. For a writer, that isn’t something to resolve. It’s something to see.

The craft isn’t about choosing light over dark. Or beauty over ugliness. It’s about learning how to frame them honestly in the same shot.

You don’t invent that tension. You notice it. You store it.

You walk the street. You look up. Always look up. And sometimes — uncomfortably — you look down.

That’s where the work begins.

Colors of San Miguel ©Lorraine Flett