Springboard

Yesterday, during an email exchange with a friend (who was aboard a train from Newark, bound for Atlantic City), we discussed his angst about being stuck on the train. He was annoyed that he had not flown to Philadelphia, as he had originally planned, then rented a car to drive to Atlantic City. His client recommended travel from Newark to Atlantic City  via train; he was unhappy that he had acquiesced. He was probably annoyed, too, that he has seen far too little of his wife in recent days and was thinking about how many days it will be before he sees her again.

I suggested to him that he use the experience as a springboard for adventure. Specifically, I suggested: “You, sir, are on an adventure that lends itself to the page! Write about the escapades, thereby adding to their mystery and allure!”

My advice was to watch the people around him and concoct their stories as a way of enhancing an otherwise unappealing experience.  I imagined who might be near him to kick off the process:

“A woman sitting near you just murdered her husband’s mistress. Behind her, a little girl nervously twists her hair as she contemplates what to tell her parents about her worse-than-expected grade in quantum physics. Another woman, a dowdy dresser in shades of brown, wipes tears from her eyes, remembering her son’s last words to her before he hung up the phone from calling her from his station in Pakistan: ‘Love you, Mom, see you in two months.’ The poignancy of that message, coming as it did just minutes before he was killed in a suicide bomb attack, is beyond the capacity of grief to comprehend.”

He responded as follows: “No, there is only one couple near me. They are Hispanic and have been continuously playing loud videos on the their iPhones.” He suggested I come up with something for THAT!

It was at that point that I realized how much it has become second nature to me to simply make things up out of thin air.

I imagined the face of a woman sitting on a train; she looked nervous, a bit disheveled, utterly distracted. I noticed, but didn’t write it down, that she was sweating, the kind of sweat that occurs not from exertion, but from fear. And so I imagined her story. As I did the story of the little girl behind her. And, finally, the dowdy woman traveling alone on the train to who knows where; probably to an empty house, a place where she will never again hear the voice of her son.

While I can readily imagine these snippets, the hard part for me is to imagine life beyond those scenes, taking the story along through its arc and, ultimately, to resolution of the conflict wrought early on in the tale.

I’m learning, though. Teaching myself, at times, and allowing others to teach me. Reading is an invaluable part of the process, but then it is an invaluable part of almost any process.