Saturday, October 17, 2009

Is everything about writing?

Believe it or not, the answer is more yes than no (but I'll agree to not always).  To illustrate my point . . .

Last night (and today) we had family visiting from out of town, which delayed my blogging, and while I was feeling guilty about not posting, I asked my DH what he thought I should blog about.  He said, "traffic."  You see, all the east/west highways in our area are under construction, so there's no easy way to get from Point A to Point B, unless you are only travelling north to south, and even some of those roads are under construction.  Our commute times have doubled travelling only a very short distance.  "You'd think someone would have planned this better," he growls.  But I can't post about traffic.  Everyone has to deal with traffic.  Unless . . .

You can imagine all the possibilities bad traffic can add to a plot.  Babies being born, road rage waiting to explode.  Traffic can bring on major conflict.  So is it just something wrong with me that I start imagining all the stories for people in their cars stuck in traffic?

It's in every day events that people relate to your stories, like getting caught in traffic, or meeting someone for the first time.  There is commonality in these things, and there is uniqueness to them.  The way someone greets you, the car you let into traffic who only moves half into your lane to block the people behind who didn't move over soon enough, the idioms and idiosyncrasies.  These are the things that I see that stick with me, like hiking and encountering a woman with a small dog who jokes that it's a pygmy albino coyote (see my Sedona post - still one of my favorite encounteres that will likely creep into a story). 

So yes, most often, everything relates into my writing.

3 comments:

  1. Oh, yes. We've been traveling, and there are some folks who will definitely be showing up in future books. It's ALL fodder.

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  2. Nice to meet you. My kids are quite convinced that everything relates to my writing, especially everything about them, even when I don't think I'm writing about them. They're often right too. "Don't you remember...?" Well yes, now they mention it, but I wasn't remembering it, not consciously...

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  3. Hi Sheila - thanks for stopping by! Yeah, funny the things that creep into my stories; incidents with my sisters, meeting my MIL for the first time ;-)

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