Things I Heard Last Wednesday

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Like almost all writers of poetry, fiction, and drama (etc.), I write down what people say. I'm especially drawn to statements or questions I hear as I pass by people who are talking, so that in a sense I'm getting the quotation out of context. At other times, I simply write down things people say to me. For example, I might ask a worker in a grocery store a question about where an item might be found, and the response strikes me as not just informational but evocative, so later I write it down. Sometimes more writing springs from such notes; sometimes, not. The lists make up a kind of "pre-writing": raw material. But they can have their own appeal, too.


Things I Heard Last Wednesday

I did not want to take that out of my bank.
I wouldn't go outside with short bangs even
on Halloween.
I'll take a comparison to Lucille Ball as
a compliment any day.
The more your head is in the sink, the better.
You can't be cold.
They have a scholarship for schizophrenics.
I've never driven anything nice before.
Nutrition is near Produce but off to the left.
The archive belongs to the family, but
it's held by the company.
That doesn't mean he didn't call.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Creative Writers Gather Data

For the short-story-writing class today, I had students gather data over the weekend. The task was to visit a public venue, listen to people, and write down phrases, statements, and questions heard. I think we were aiming for a list of 20 separate items.

However, the idea was not to "eavesdrop," in the classic sense. Part of the plan was not to listen to whole conversation but to seize isolated utterances. We also stressed paying attention to exactly how people phrase things.

I've used the exercise a few times, both for poetry and fiction classes, but this time it proved especially rich. Numerous puzzling, shocking, hilarious, cryptic, uncanny, oddly phrased, and mysterious phrases, statements, and questions were captured.

What to do with the "data"? One implicit "lesson," I think, is to remind oneself of just how powerful speech--or, in short-fiction terms, "dialogue"--is: how complicated, full of conflict, and volatile it is. More specifically, one approach is to take what someone says literally. One example I can think of is that a person heard another person say, "I didn't know people needed blood." Of course, we can fill in around the statement to make it seem a reasonable thing to say, but for creative-writing purposes, we may want to assume it's just a stark statement of fact. Then the question to ask is under what circumstances would an adult say such a thing "for real" ? The fictional "answer" is the seed of the story.

In the airport this weekend, I tried to "do" the task myself, and I overheard a teenaged girl/woman say to another girl/woman of the same age, "She takes a lot of drugs, and vice versa." What a great thing to say! The phrasing is unwittingly funny--and wise. In what dialogue from what story might this statement work? That's the question, or one question. A student in class also observed how "vice" took on additional meaning in this case.

As one might expect, the person who wrote down a given statement, question, or phrase--because s/he knew the context or had been tempted to fill in the context--was often less able to see the creative possiblilities than those who had just heard the statement for the first time. So I guess another more or less obvious "lesson" is to try to be able to see and hear the recorded language freshly--almost naively, but not quite.

May your listening/observing be most creatively productive.