Any story you see is somebody's life story. People's life story. A nation's story, with their names eluded. I've always talked about how observation is foundational to realistic creative production.

And the irony of the matter is that this is actually much more prevalent in fiction than in non-fiction.

Unless you just want to recycle the contemporary web novel plots.

You know, the classics, romance and billionaire, wolves. Vampire stuff that trends on Webnovels. Those kind of plots. And that's very valid – I'm a fan 🪭 

But once you've stepped into another realm of writing. Writing that has to do with creatively and almost accurately capturing the realities of human existence…

Stories people come to, not just for escapism, but for resonance, for awareness, for the almost universal feeling. To find possible solutions. To see how to navigate life and make it through related instances — that is where observation becomes the highlight of it.

Throughout the weekend I wasn't planning to go to school on Monday.

But I just woke up and stood up to go watch the sunrise. The clouds covered it though, so I didn't get a good glimpse.

I was about to go back to my room when I suddenly had this urge to go to school.

I never planned to go. I didn't prepare my uniform. Didn't prepare alternative clothes. So I just rushed, threw on something, and left for school yesterday morning.

And when I got to school I realized: I couldn't have gotten any of these any other day.

Because I'm working on a novel right now: Solace At Home. From the first class to the last, I just picked up raw materials for the nonfictional fiction.

If you're naturally observant, sometimes you don't even have to force it. You just know when something has been dropped. When a substance is made, because you're already not concerned with most things so meaningful ones are the ones that will naturally register in your mind.

Our lecturer narrated a very 'interesting' story with so many implications and undertones, but the class was just laughing at it. Results had just dropped and there was panic amongst the students, and statements were during that panic that revealed greater fluctuations to me.

On my way back, I experienced a scene with a traffic regulator and an impatient driver, and so much more.o,

Someone's quiz wasn't recorded — and ended up failing something they were supposed to pass and many more things.

To infiltrate systems you don't have to go into it, you don't have to be part of it or even stick around physically searching for whatever, just observe the victims of the looseness. 

A 100-level second-semester student who has barely been physically present for 50 days, can walk into school on one day and come out with enough human behaviour, dialogue, institutional absurdity, anxiety, hierarchy, and little social details to feed a fictional world.

If you're attentive, a few concentrated encounters can expose patterns that somebody living inside the system has become too accustomed to notice.You take the emotional truth, the behavioural detail, the contradiction, the dialogue pattern, the atmosphere, the little social dynamics—and later, those things can become something else entirely.