A Creative Writing Approach to Perspective and Description
13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl
Wallace Stevens wrote "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" in 1917. It is a poem where each section is a different lens — one image, one angle, one frame of reference. You can apply that same method to any subject. A fat girl is no different than a blackbird for the purposes of the exercise. The point isn't to describe her body clinically or romantically. The point is to train yourself to see a subject from angles that shift meaning with each turn. I have used this framework with students and with my own drafting practice for over a decade. The most common mistake people make is turning each "way" into a paragraph of explanation or emotional commentary. That kills the exercise. Each section should be roughly three to five lines at most. Sometimes two lines. The restraint is what forces originality. Here is how I actually teach and use the 13 Ways framework when applied to "13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl," along with the structural rules and the pitfalls I keep running into.
The first section you write is usually the hardest because your brain defaults to the most obvious description. You start with the physical — her body, her clothes, her face. That is fine as a warm-up, but if you stop there the piece flattens into a catalog. The trick is to let section one acknowledge the physical and then immediately pivot in section two away from the body entirely. Let the second section be about something unrelated that the girl triggers in the observer — a memory, a sound, a piece of architecture, weather, something mundane. The contrast does the work. I spent a long time wrestling with section four of a draft where I was trying to make it about light falling on her. It read like a painting critique. What I ended up doing was rewriting it from the perspective of an object in the room — a chair, a window, a book — that simply observed her entering the space without any internal monologue attached. That stripped the sentimentality right out. The piece became sharper because the narrator stopped performing emotion and just reported. One counter-intuitive thing about this method that beginners consistently miss: you do not need all thirteen sections to be about the same literal person. The Stevens original shifts between a single blackbird and a broader contemplation of perception itself. Your "fat girl" can be a specific individual in some sections and a concept — the idea of a large female body in public space — in others. The tension between the concrete and the abstract is where the piece gains weight. If every section is the same girl in the same room, it reads like a diary entry. If the frame keeps expanding and contracting, it reads like a meditation.
Another common pitfall is making every section equally weighted. Some sections should be dense and image-heavy. Others should be nearly blank — two lines that do a lot of structural work. In my own practice, I usually leave one or two sections deliberately sparse, almost minimalist, to create breathing room. The reader needs spaces to land between the heavier stanzas. Here is a practical note on how this actually plays out during drafting. When I work through the thirteen sections, I typically write them out of order. Section seven often reveals itself only after I have written sections one through five. I leave placeholders. I come back. This method is not linear. Expect to revisit each section three or four times before it stops sounding like something you have read elsewhere. That is normal. The first draft of each section will almost always contain a cliché — something about warmth, or comfort, or softness. Delete it. Find the edge instead. The friction point in the image is where the reader hooks in.
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Structural breakdown of the 13 Ways framework
The framework does not require strict numbering. You can present the sections as unnumbered prose blocks, or you can number them. Numbering gives the reader a sense of progression, which can feel didactic if overused. Unnumbered sections feel more organic but risk blurring into one another. I tend to use Roman numerals sparingly — only when a particular section requires the reader to know it is a distinct movement. Otherwise I let the white space do the organizing. The language should be plain. Avoid decorative adjective stacks. A single precise noun and a clear verb will carry more weight than three adjectives and a passive construction. Fat bodies are already described with an exhausting library of euphemisms and pathologies in mainstream writing. The exercise gains its power from stripping those away and replacing them with observed fact, unexpected comparison, and honest attention. If you hit a wall on any section, try changing the point of view. Write that section from the perspective of someone else in the scene — a child, a stranger across the street, a reflection in a shop window. This shifts the emotional temperature and often unlocks imagery you were too close to the subject to see. I once got completely stuck on a section about a woman eating at a diner, and rewriting it from the perspective of the napkin dispenser on the table — utterly devoid of judgment, just registering mass and presence — solved the problem in one pass. It sounds absurd but it worked because it removed the narrator's moral framing entirely.
The final section, the thirteenth, is the one most writers overreach on. They try to land a moral, deliver a message, tie everything together. Don't. The last section should echo or refract an earlier section, not summarize it. Leave the reader with an image that resonates rather than a conclusion that explains. If the piece earns its ending, the reader will feel it without being told what to feel. The exercise takes roughly forty-five minutes to an hour for a first pass if you are working at a steady pace. Editing it down to a tight thirteen-section piece usually requires another two to three hours across multiple sessions. Do not rush the edit. The difference between a competent piece and a good one is almost always in the revision, where you cut the explanatory language and let the images stand alone. This framework is useful beyond creative writing. I have seen photographers, documentary filmmakers, and even UX designers use the "13 Ways" structure to push past first-impression thinking about a subject. The constraint of exactly thirteen sections forces you to generate enough material to find the patterns that aren't obvious on the first pass. That is the real value — not the poem itself but the habit of sustained, varied attention it trains.
If you want to study the form before attempting it, read Stevens' original blackbird poem alongside John Ashbery's "Some Trees" and Claudia Rankine's cinematic interludes in Citizen. All three use shifting perspective and fragmented observation to build meaning without narrative glue. The technique is older than Stevens but he made it accessible enough that anyone can pick it up and run with it.
