Day 294 – Observation
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The Art of Extreme Observation: What Georges Perec’s 60-Page Parisian Stakeout Can Teach Every Writer
Imagine sitting at a cafe table in the heart of Paris for three consecutive days. You aren’t writing a sweeping historical fiction novel, inventing dramatic plot twists, or even checking your phone. Instead, you are simply acting as a human security camera—writing down the make of every passing car, the colour of a pigeon’s feathers, the exact time a woman in a green coat walks by, and the hum of conversation drifting from the bar.
This isn’t a mindfulness exercise; it was a radical literary experiment.
Over a full October weekend in 1974, French avant-garde writer and filmmaker Georges Perec posted up in Paris’s Place Saint-Sulpice. Armed with notebooks, he attempted to exhaust his subject completely. The result? An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a fascinating 60-page essay that redefines how we look at the world around us.
So, is this something every writer should do? And more importantly, why should you waste an entire weekend staring at ordinary life when you could be drafting your next masterpiece?
Let’s dive into the radical genius of Perec’s experiment and explore why hyper-observation is the secret weapon every writer needs.
What Did Georges Perec Actually Do?
Georges Perec was a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who enjoyed creating works using constrained writing techniques.
For his Place Saint-Sulpice experiment, Perec’s constraint was simple: record the infratrivial—the ordinary, the trivial, the background noise that people usually ignore.
Over Thursday, October 18, Friday, October 19, and Saturday, October 20, 1974, Perec sat at various cafes (Café de la Mairie, Tabac Saint-Sulpice) and noted:
- The weather shifting.
- Buses arriving and departing (Route 86, Route 63).
- Dogs being walked.
- The changing shadows of the Saint-Sulpice church.
- Fragments of overheard dialogue.
He wasn’t looking for a murder mystery to unfold. He wasn’t waiting for a celebrity sighting. He was deliberately focusing on what happens when nothing special happens.
As Perec wrote in the introduction:
“What happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? How to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?”
Is This Something Every Writer Should Do?
Let’s be honest: you probably shouldn’t spend 60 pages detailing the license plates of cars in your local strip mall today. Most writers are already strapped for time, balancing day jobs, families, and actual writing deadlines.
However, every writer should adopt the mindset of Perec’s experiment.
Whether you write literary fiction, sci-fi world-building, high-octane thrillers, or creative nonfiction, doing a localised “exhaustion” exercise completely transforms your relationship with reality and your craft. Here is why you need to try it at least once.
1. It Cures “Writer’s Blindness”
Writers are professional daydreamers. We live inside our heads, plotting, planning, and worrying about character arcs. Because of this, we suffer from what psychologists call inattentional blindness—we stop seeing the actual physical world around us.
When you force yourself to sit still and record mundane details for an hour (let alone a whole weekend), the world snaps back into high definition. You notice how sunlight hits a cracked pavement, the precise way an elderly man adjusts his scarf, or the nervous tic of a barista dropping a ceramic cup. These are the sensory details that turn flat, generic writing into immersive, breathing fiction.
2. It Teaches You the Power of Constraint
In a world of infinite possibilities (blank Google Docs, endless plot directions), writers often freeze. Perec’s experiment proves that limitations breed creativity.
By restricting yourself to a single street corner, park bench, or coffee shop for a defined period, you remove the paralysis of choice. You stop worrying about what to write and focus entirely on how to capture what is right in front of you.
3. It Deepens Your Understanding of Pacing and Rhythm
Read An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, and you’ll notice the text has a rhythmic, hypnotic quality. It mimics the natural ebb and flow of daily life—slow lulls in the afternoon, rushes of commuter traffic, quiet evenings.
By practising extreme observation, you learn the natural cadences of the real world. When you translate this into storytelling, your narrative pacing improves. You learn when to speed up a scene (like morning rush hour) and when to let the atmosphere linger (like a quiet Sunday afternoon).
4. It Retrains Your Brain to Value the “Infratrivial”
The best stories aren’t always about explosions, dramatic breakups, or epic fantasy quests. Often, the most resonant moments in literature happen in the spaces in between: a conversation over lukewarm soup, the silence in a car after an argument, the way someone stirs their coffee.
Perec teaches us to pay attention to the background noise. As writers, our job is to make readers care about the ordinary. If you can make a 60-page essay about a mundane Parisian square engaging, you can make any scene in your novel compelling.
How to Do Your Own “Perec Weekend” (Or Afternoon)
You don’t need to fly to Paris to channel Georges Perec. You can run your own micro-version of this experiment this very weekend. Here is how:
- Pick a Mundane Location: Choose somewhere unremarkable—a local diner, a subway platform, a hotel lobby, or a bench in a suburban park. Avoid hyper-stimulating tourist hotspots.
- Bring a Notebook (Not a Phone): Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. Use a physical notebook and pen. Digital devices invite distraction; paper demands presence.
- Commit to a Timeframe: Start small. Give yourself one uninterrupted hour. If you’re feeling ambitious, try three hours.
- Record Without Filtering: Write down everything. Do not judge whether it’s “interesting” enough. Write the mundane details: “12:15 PM. A pigeon with a missing toe lands near a discarded crisp packet. A woman in a yellow jacket walks past, looking at her watch. The hum of an idling delivery van.”
- Review and Mine: Later, read back through your notes. Highlight the phrases, sensory triggers, and micro-moments that jump out at you. Drop these observations into your current work-in-progress to anchor your characters in a vivid, tangible reality.
Final Thoughts
Georges Perec didn’t write An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris to give us a plot blueprint; he wrote it to wake us up.
As writers, we are chroniclers of the human experience. But we cannot write about humanity if we aren’t willing to watch it—truly watch it—in its most unpolished, unscripted, and ordinary moments.
So, pack a notebook, find a bench, and start noticing. You might just surprise yourself with what you find when you stop looking for a story and let the world come to you.
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