TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Highlands Today

It All Begins With People Watching

ADVERTISEMENT

Joyce Minor

Published: January 20, 2008

I'm a people watcher. It comes with being a writer, and it's at least partly why I knew at a very young age that writing would be my life.

I just seem to have been born with an insatiable curiosity about people. It's not nosiness. It's not mean-spirited in any way. It's just an irresistible need to understand what makes people tick, and help others understand it too.

When I'm in an airport or a shopping mall you'll often find me with pen and pad in hand taking notes about the passing parade. Have you ever noticed how diverse humanity really is? I'm not just talking about race. I'm talking about the multiplicity of physical form and personality — short, tall, fat, thin, loud, quiet, overbearing, shy, happy, sad, trusting, suspicious … the variety is endless.

Blond or bald, bucktoothed or toothless, I make notes about them all. I record snippets of conversation, particularly interesting colloquialisms and slang. I make notes about the way people move and dress and interact, and especially about habits people display but probably don't even know they have.

All writers are note jotters. It helps us create interesting plotlines, believable characters and provocative commentary. I think it was Dickens who called his notes "grist for the mill."

As I'm people watching, I also note ideas that spring from what I observe. Often I'll jot in the margin how or where an observation might be useful. It's rare for any of these jottings to actually make it into print. They're too abstract — too disjointed. They're what Joan Didion called "bits of the mind's string too short to use."

But sooner or later, some of those "bits of string" will get wound together and form the core of a story.
And sometimes, on rare golden occasions, one of those tangled wads of insight starts rolling downhill, picking up speed, gathering ideas like a growing snowball. The result is a story or column that flows out so effortlessly it seems to write itself. It's absolutely magic, and, therefore, for me, almost impossible to believe or enjoy.

Most of the time writing is like pulling your own teeth. Remember what it was like when you were a kid with a loose tooth? It hurt like heck but you couldn't quit fiddling with it. Sometimes you actually twisted it completely around, and still the blasted thing would not come out. But no matter how frustrated you got, or how much it hurt, you kept at it until, finally, it dropped into your hand, bloody and repulsive and wonderful. You couldn't have been more proud if you had given birth.

That's how writing is most of the time — painful, frustrating, and achingly slow. The story that comes easily is magical, but surreal. The one that has to be dragged out kicking and screaming is bloody reality, and infinitely more satisfying.

Invariably, those are the stories that began with people watching.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT