SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT

“This will give you something to write about.” That is what friends and acquaintances say to me when life has just egregiously insulted me: when I buy brand new tires to drive to the airport but have a flat on the Interstate and miss my flight; when I take the dog to do her business first thing in the morning and sleepily lock myself out of my house, barefoot, wearing my skimpiest nightie; when a cat projectile-pukes directly into the paper feed of my printer and nobody, but nobody, will fix it. Or when the septic system backs up, or the water heater quits in the middle of my shower, or I back my car into a tree – again. Or when I slop scrambled eggs down my neck during brunch. “You can use that in your writing,” people say.

Because they mean well, I smile and nod and refrain from shrieking at them, Noooo! No! When crap happens, it’s generally not plot material. Quite the opposite: it is life interfering with my writing.

William Wordsworth once said poetry originates in emotion recollected in tranquility. For “poetry” substitute “my next novel.” Emotion? I have freightloads of emotion left over from childhood and adolescence, enough to last me for a lifetime of writing, and I think this is true of most novelists. What I really need at this point is the tranquility part of the dynamic.

In this regard, crabgrass on the lawn of mature life is generally not a help. “You can write about this” might be true of living in an airplane hangar for a year, but definitely not of most of my adulthood’s mundane urgencies such as needing a new roof on the house, menopausal visits to the gynecologist, getting mixed up in a lawsuit, automotive breakdowns or, for that matter, nervous ones – no, just kidding. But I truly could use more breathing room to get more and better writing done. Mostly, daily life gets in the way of writing.

I don’t mean to give the impression that adulthood is a total bust as far as creative material is concerned. I’m only trying to explain that when people say, “That’ll give you something to write about,” they are under a serious misapprehension. What you’re far more likely to write about is them. People. Many of whom are doozies. For example, there’s the guitar man. Every day he walks around town carrying two or three colorful toy guitars, never the same twice; he must have quite a collection. He is friendly, if vague. I would love to know, or imagine, how he lives and why he hikes around with both fists full of plastic guitars.

And he’s just one person. I’ve met lots of people who give me something to write about. The hoarder next door who lost a package of ground beef in the kitchen until the stink and the flies led her to it. The man down the street who put cow skulls painted school-bus yellow on top of all his fence posts. The neighbor woman who ate so many carrots she became orange. And many, many more with larger stories in them.

Adult life also offers useful new settings. My forthcoming suspense novel, DRAWN INTO DARKNESS, takes place largely in the Florida swamps with which I became acquainted as an adult. I had my first experience of small town living as an adult, and my first experience of a gated community, which would have been a wonderful place for a murderer to hide a body. In winter the level of the lake water was lowered to prevent ice from damaging the docks, and in the spring it was brought back up. A clandestine grave at the edge of the lake the night before refilling would have been covered with water by morning. Nobody ever pointed this out to me as something to write about, however.

What friends do tell me is that a broken ankle “will give me something to write about.” Well, it’s true that every visit to a hospital emergency room is an opportunity to take mental notes. But I don’t need any more data at this point, thank you very much, guys. I’d just like a good long spell of recollecting emotion in tranquility. I already have plenty to write about.