Ecouter et Ecrire

1 July is Bugged day. I'll be listening out for an overhead snippet of conversation that sets me on the way to a piece of writing.

This is how a lot of my writing starts anyway. Something discussed or overheard starts the wheels turning. Who knows? You might see yourself here in my pages, glimpses of your life preserved in the aspic of the interweb. I've already said I do this, so I feel I have carte blanche.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Writing imposes sense and structure on a random, disordered world. You know me: I like that. I loved this quote from Richard Ford's Independence Day. Frank Bascombe, ex-sportswriter and now a real-estate agent says:

Sometimes, though not that often, I wish I were still a writer, since so much goes through anybody’s mind and right out the window, whereas for a writer - even a shitty writer - so much less is lost. If you get divorced from your wife, for instance, and later think back to a time, say, twelve years before, when you almost broke up the first time, but didn’t because you decided you loved each other too much, or were too smart, or because you both had gumption and a shred of good character, then later after everything was finished, you decided you actually should’ve gotten divorced long before because you think now you missed something wonderful and irreplaceable and as a result are filled with a whistling longing you can’t seem to shake - if you were a writer, even a half-baked short-story writer, you’d have someplace to put that fact build-up so you wouldn’t have to think about it all the time. You’d just write it all down, put quotes around the most gruesome and rueful lines, stick them in somebody’s mouth who doesn’t exist (or better, a thinly-disguised enemy of yours), turn it into pathos and get it all off your ledger for the enjoyment of others.

I find that the good moments, the best feelings, are conjured and remembered all the more readily when they've been captured for my Postcards. And the bad, the sad, the hard, the horrible days can lose their power when they're pinned to a page like hornets in a Victorian entomology collection.