Friday, March 29, 2013

Writers' Moments


by Sheila Connolly

People who don't write won't understand why sometimes their writer friends go still, with a distant look in their eyes.  No, it's not a form of seizure:  we're just paying attention in a different way.

It often happens unexpectedly. Every now and then, we'll be going about our normal business, and a little bell goes off in our head:  this would be great for a story.  It's like a switch is thrown, and  suddenly all your senses are on high alert.  You're paying attention to details—sights, colors, the space around you, facial features, voices, and just about anything else.  Or maybe it's like when your cat suddenly sits up and pricks its ears, watching or sensing something you haven't even noticed yet (my cats once spotted a mouse coming down the stairs on the other side of the house in the dark).

It can happen anytime, anywhere.  For example:  this past weekend I attended a (non-writer) conference, and stayed in a slightly shabby midrange hotel in the Boston suburbs.  I was headed downstairs for the cocktail hour, and when the elevator arrived on my floor, there were already two people on it, clearly a couple.  And that alarm went off in my writer head, and I started making mental notes (all the while trying to look like I wasn't looking at them, of course, and obviously I don't have pictures).

The details:  both thirty-something, tall, attractive, fit, well groomed and (for lack of a better word) interesting-looking.  He was wearing beige dress pants and a sage-green fine-waled corduroy jacket that looked like suede, so smooth that I wanted to touch it.  She looked a little more "artsy," with slim jeans, layered shirts and a scarf.  They were a well-matched pair.  They never said a word during our three-story ride down to the lobby.  Neither looked like they were trying to impress anyone, but they definitely didn't look like they belonged at that hotel—I would have put them in Cambridge or Boston. I really would like to have known who they were and what they were doing there.  But I didn't ask.  That would spoil the spell.

All this in less than a minute.  I will file them away and use them somewhere, like when one of my protagonists gets on an elevator, and the people already in it make her feel like she should turn around and change clothes, get a haircut and find a new job.



Something similar happened when I was in Ireland last fall, on a much bigger scale.  I had the chance to visit the pub that is the model for Sullivan's Pub in the County Cork series. When I first saw it, it was called Connolly's. In its heyday it was a widely-known music venue in Ireland (far beyond the regional level—musicians whose names you'd recognized have played there, even though it can hold no more than maybe a hundred people, at least legally).  I hadn't been inside in over ten years, and it's no longer open, except for special events. But I wanted to see how accurate my memories were, so I knocked on the door because the woman in the cafĂ© down the street had told me that the last Connolly owner still lived above the pub, and she was there, and I ended up spending a couple of hours in her parlor with her cat on my lap talking about the old days. Of course I was delighted to be there, and of course I was taking pictures of the place like crazy.



There went that bell in my head again. I realized that the whole plot of the third book in the series had just fallen into my lap. Not just bits and pieces, but the whole story. Suddenly I was looking at details in a new way, and figuring how I could use them to give the story color and substance.

And that's one of the joys of being a writer—the gift or the craft of seeing in a different, more intense way, and then sharing that vision with other people.




6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This struck a note in me too. thanks. I often get my best plot ideas in the middle of a concert! I always keep pen and paper in my purse and scribble furiously while the music soars! Thelma in Manhattan

Sandra Parshall said...

Perfect description of the weirdness that goes on in a fiction writer's mind.

Steven M. Moore said...

It's not just seeing things differently, it's also seeing them as they are--and recognizing that other people don't!
I don't think it's exclusive to writers. It's part of what we call a creative personality. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and jot down some idea that might appear in a story of novel. I used to do the same with an equation or method for analyzing some obscure data set.
Here's a thought: I often played alone as a child and didn't have TV (yeah, that dates me). My play was a creation of an active imagination. I learned how to read with comic books, imagining what the characters were saying, or creating my own comics and filling in the balloons. Did I receive a head start on creativity at least, relative to most kids today? Your thoughts? Or, was I just weird from the get-go?

Sheila Connolly said...

Steven, what you said is interesting. I did grow up with television, as did most of my friends, but in our elementary school recesses, we took the characters and created our own stories and acted them out. Of course, those were the cowboy days, so there were lots of horses in our plots--and the people we didn't like got to play the ladies and stay home and cook while the rest of us galloped off. For some reason we were all much taken by Have Gun, Will Travel.

Steven M. Moore said...

Hi Sheila,
We should take a poll maybe? ;-) My own experience certainly helped with my own kids--I never worried about them playing alone. Of course, some of the things they created were, to say the least, surprising!
Yes, Paladin...I remember him well! (We did finally buy a TV.) But on the playground we were more into sports play. I secretly wanted to be Roy Campanella, the famous Brooklyn Dodgers catcher, so much so that I didn't object when my 6th and 7th grade baseball teams made me catcher. (I later found out it was because I was the only kid who wouldn't blink when the batter swung the bat.)
I don't think kids are creatively imagining when they're playing those RPGs on their computer, i.e. it's not the same thing.
r/Steve

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