Showing the Concrete

I woke up this morning happy about my plan to write every morning during NaNoWriMo-November and thinking it's a shame it's still a couple weeks away.
As if I couldn't start now....
Also, I probably don't want to write fiction, much less a novel. 
As if I have to....

I would like to write better, for myself. 

Specifically, I'd like to be able to describe physical things better.

I don't want to write lyrical descriptions––I don't like to read them. I would like to be able to add a touch of physical description to my writing.

My writing has often needed more dough for the raisins, more cushion for the sitting––more air space. I don't know how to write that, or not well.

I also simply don't know the words for things--the parts of windows, for instance. I don't want to learn technical writing, but I would like to pay attention to the parts of things.

I'm going to start my NaNoWriMo by writing descriptions of my coworkers, trying to catch them in their physical selves––
like Flaubert touching on Emma's interior using only exterior descriptions––
not listing things my coworkers believe or their demographics (which is how I think of them to myself).

This will be like sketching in a travel sketchbook--it will help me pay attention to details.
I'm not very attentive to physical details.
Once I was trying to describe Mr Furniture to a customer, and they said, "Oh, the guy with the nose ring?"

I'd never noticed he has a nose ring. 

Mr Furniture would be a good coworker to start with because he's very physical by nature*, and by his work. He's the furniture guy, and he's also an artist, both of which are about moving physical things around.

(* "By nature" = Mr Furniture told me that when he was seven, he threw himself off the couch trying to fly, and broke his arm. I still see that approach in him.)

So today at work, I'm going to pay attention to what Mr Furniture DOES that shows who he is...

I think that will be fun. 
I also think I'll post these exercises, or some of them.
I don't know if they'll be interesting to read, but I always pay more attention to writing if it's going out into the world.

Oh--here's the sort of thing Flannery O'Connor says about the sensory nature of writing that got me thinking how I've never been good at this. From "Writing Short Stories" in Mystery and Manners.

"The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible.  He has only a short space to do it in and he can't do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete––so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him."

And this, from O'Connor's "The Nature and Aim of Fiction", is what I've always thought about the material a writer needs:

"The fact is that anyone who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it."