Everyday Wonder
[This article first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine.]
We typically associate wonder with science fiction, fantasy, or magical realism. Yet moments of wonder—an experience of amazement and awe that stills the mind and leaves us speechless—are all around us. Writers in any genre can captivate readers by using specific techniques to highlight the everyday wonder in daily life.
Wonder is a distinctly nonverbal experience, which differentiates it from curiosity (and the verb to wonder). Curiosity engages the thinking mind; the experience of wonder briefly stops thought.
Skilled writers can take everyday objects and processes and turn them into wondrous experiences for the reader.
As you read the examples below, notice how each author uses not only a given technique, but also their specificity of word choice and use of sensory engagement to evoke a sense of wonder. The more specific you are in drawing the reader in through sensory and somatic details, the more universally these moments will resonate.
Zooming In and Bullet Time
In order to function in our world, we take many complex processes for granted—unfettered access to utilities, the functioning of our bodies, that hummingbirds and bees will continue to spread pollen. Each of these processes, though, is the inevitable result of dozens to hundreds of earlier moments.
Writers can evoke wonder by zooming in and slowing down time (“bullet time”) or zooming in to show details invisible to the human eye.
A masterclass of this approach is Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which entwines two narratives, one set in Japan and one on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. The latter gives rise to many moments of wonder like this one:
The Internet was their primary portal onto the world, and a portal that was always slamming shut. Their access was supplied through a 3G cellular network, but … The signal had to travel across miles of churning oceans, through densely saturated air, and then, once it reached their shores, thread its way through the tall, wind-lashed treetops.
While Ozeki is writing about a remote island, the same holds true for anyone who has ever texted a friend across the country or the ocean.
Zooming in isn’t just for fiction writers. Consider this passage from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle:
How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each?
While the numbers are approximate, his use of books and pages makes clear the inconceivable amount of information each cell contains.
How to Zoom In
- Choose a mundane object, process, or situation in your story (“X”).
- Look upstream toward the source: What had to happen before X could happen? Before a bee can spread pollen, a seed had to be harvested, packaged, sold, shipped, planted, and tended. Be as specific and detailed as you can.
- Once you have the steps or information, write it out as narrative. Add in evocative details (“churning ocean,” “wind-lashed treetops”) and verbs (“thread its way”).
- If you want to draw the reader’s attention to a particular moment, go even deeper into that part; describe it in more depth than the others.
Zooming Out: Putting Humans in Perspective
If zooming in helps us see the microcosm, zooming out helps us see the macrocosm.
From a human viewpoint, Earth seems enormous. It would take the average person nearly a year to walk its circumference1. While a human life seems long, in the grand scheme of things, we’re here for not much longer than a cherry blossom.
You can evoke wonder by zooming out in space, as songwriter Julie Gold did, in the song made famous by Bette Midler:
From a distance, the world looks blue and green
And the snow-capped mountains white …
Or you can zoom out—fast-forward—in time, as Richard Powers does in The Overstory. In about 300 words, Powers covers a century of family events. This gives the impression of fast-forwarding through a photo album (which is, in fact, what his main character is doing). I’ve cut it down to a third of its original length to give you an idea:
The photos hide everything: the twenties that do not roar for the Hoels. The Depression that costs them two hundred acres and sends half the family to Chicago … [T]he dozens of joyous weddings, christenings, and graduations … The lawsuit between cousins … The handiwork of heroin and Agent Orange that comes home with nephews from ’Nam. The hushed-up incest, the lingering alcoholism, a daughter’s elopement with the high school English teacher. The cancers (breast, colon, lung), the heart disease … everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame.
This dizzying speed of events is punctuated by another character’s comment and the main character’s response:
“‘Makes you think different about things, don’t it?’ It did.”
How to Zoom Out
- To zoom out spatially, consider what your story’s central conflict, or setting, might look like from a bird’s eye view. How might this shift the reader’s perception of the conflict or setting? Where might it be helpful for the reader to have this broader perspective?
- To zoom out (fast-forward) through time, make a list of all the beats that happen between the start and end of your fast-forward. What has happened to your main character? To each family? To the built or natural environment in which the story is centered?
- This is good backstory to have, whether or not it appears in the final draft.
Reveal Hidden Worlds
Seagulls live in a world of wind currents. Mycelia spread underneath vast forests that blanket the size of an entire state or more—yet we only see the fruiting bodies, aka mushrooms. As the old saying goes, if you asked a fish how the water was, he’d respond, “What’s water?” Most humans take what we can perceive to be all that there is.
By revealing a world or reality that humans aren’t typically aware of, writers can create an experience of wonder. An excellent example is this passage from Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The narrator, Pi, is on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, trying to avoid being eaten by the boat’s lone other occupant: a Bengal tiger.
With just one glance I discovered that the sea is a city. Just below me, all around, unsuspected by me, were highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were madly racing about, no doubt honking and hollering at each other.
By using anthropomorphic constructs to describe the aquatic world, Martel helps readers see and hear this oft-hidden dimension and to feel Pi’s wonder at it.
Revealing hidden worlds is a technique well-suited to narrative nonfiction writers, especially those writing about nature. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer reveals that, contrary to how Western culture operates, plants and trees are cooperative:
If one tree fruits, they all fruit—there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.
This contradicts the colonialist worldview of competition and individualism, which inspires in readers both wonder and an implicit questioning of the way we’ve been conditioned to think.
How to Reveal Hidden Worlds
- What aspect of your story—setting, characters, a particular experience—is typically invisible to humans, or a large segment of humans?
- How might you describe it in such a way that readers who have never considered this reality might be able to experience it? Try using action and characterization as Martel does, or imply a contrast to humans, as Kimmerer does.
Create Juxtapositions Across Space and Time
One of my favorite techniques is to link an item or experience across time, distance, and/or cultures. Erum Shazia Hasan does this masterfully in her novel We Meant Well. Her main character, Maya, an American employee of a global charity, is sitting in an African village, watching locals clad in donated clothing.
I’ve wondered where these articles come from, who wore them last, if their previous owners know that their threads belong to [the village of] Likanni now; if people somehow intermix through the sharing of fabric. Whether some kid in Florida suddenly, inexplicably feels the fear then victorious laughter of a Likanni boy dodging militias, wearing his T-shirt.
How to Juxtapose
- Items or experiences can be juxtaposed across time, location, or culture. Hasan manages all three at once.
- To juxtapose time, consider how the same item or experience might have been perceived in other eras. Brainstorm a list of at least 20 different time points, then choose the most compelling one or a blend.
- For location, look at what else might be happening elsewhere at the same moment. When your main character in New York is pouring a cup of coffee at 6 a.m., for example, what is her ex-lover doing at that moment in Albuquerque? If you have a braided story that unfolds in one time frame, this is a great way to move from strand to strand.
- For cultures, focus more on the unfamiliar-to-readers culture, as Hasan does here. We already know the dominant Western culture, so that needs fewer cues to evoke in the reader. The phrase “some kid in Florida” is enough to conjure an image in the reader.
Evoke Timeless Nostalgia
Another way to evoke wonder is by taking something familiar and making it new, as Colson Whitehead does in his sweetly comic coming-of-age novel, Sag Harbor. He spends 763 words describing the first time narrator Ben held hands with a girl nicknamed Spider for her lengthy limbs, at a roller-rink birthday party. Here’s a condensed excerpt:
Our fingers slobbered over each other … As my fingers slid in the grooves between her knuckles, I reckoned that her spidery fingers provided more points of contact than those of our classmates. If you were going to hold hands with someone, this was the hand to hold, volume-wise … I turned to her, she looked at me and I smiled and lifted my eyebrows, this suave tic. Then it was quickly eyes down again. Too much! I squeezed her hand twice in some kind of weird code and she squeezed back. And then my other hand occurred to me. It was empty.
By slowing the narrative down to approximate the real-time pace of events, Whitehead reminds every reader of that awkward-but-inevitable adolescent moment of first contact. You don’t have to be Gen X or have ever set foot in a roller rink to implicitly understand the blend of wonder and terror in that first touch.
How to Evoke Timeless Nostalgia
- Choose a pivotal moment from your novel or memoir, one that encompasses a universal experience among your readers.
- Take your main character deeply into the somatic experience of that event or moment—for example, were his legs quivering as he crossed the stage to pick up an award? Did all her words tumble out at once in her first job interview?
- Be deeply specific using all seven senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, hearing, intuition, and somatic. Here, “slobbered” is the perfect evocative verb, because we remember that slimy teenage sweatiness.
Everyday Wonder Is Everywhere
There are infinite opportunities to create wonder from everyday objects and experiences, regardless of your genre. In fiction genres, you can create this experience; in nonfiction, your task is to reveal what already exists.
As with all great writing, the key to evoking wonder successfully is specificity. Every noun, verb, and adjective is chosen precisely for the experience it will evoke in the reader. Wonder is all around us if we know how to look.
