Some things that float my boat…
SPOILER ALERT! Ahoy matey! If you haven’t read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, then be warned of book spoilers ahead.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, while hilariously funny all by itself, (I’ve never looked at cows the same!) shaped me when I read about Douglas Adam’ process of writing it. He talked about the serendipitous circumstances written into earlier scenes that worked out just right later on, like when Arthur Dent finds himself on the cricket pitch and happens to have a ball in his pocket that he caught earlier at a game and slipped in there. Hearing this from such a successful writer immensely boosted my confidence in allowing the creative process to just happen, and to not worry that my writing won’t be clever. If a device is meant to be there, it will. If it isn’t, you find a way to write it in later or a connection to an earlier event will become clear. There’s an old Arabic (?) saying: Trust in God, but tether your camel first. So, fellow writer, including myself, trust the process that what you need will be there within the work you’ve already done.
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Neffenegger touched me deeply. So deeply that when I was on the final chapter of the book I just had to finish it (because what torture is it to be so close to finding out what happens and have to wait hours to find out because you have to go to that pesky place called ‘work’! In this case, I was working as an ESL teacher in Japan.) The problem was, if I didn’t leave at a certain time, I would miss my train, and subsequent connecting train, and thus be late for work – a huge no-no in Japan! So I read while I left my apartment, missed the lock a few times on the door because the words were more important, read down the stairs and navigated by peripheral vision all the way down the street – at some point during which I began to cry at the heartache on the page. By the time I reached the station, I had become a right sobbing mess! The gaggle of little old Japanese ladies waiting on the train platform didn’t quite know what to make of me. Did they break form and reach out to the gaijin (foreigner) who was obviously distraught, but had her nose buried in a book that she was either actually reading or just pretending to by turning the pages? Or did they ignore me, and just give me the practiced sidelong glances so many Japanese have mastered to observe the world around them (this was great fun to try and catch!)? Or did they do the impolite thing (as explained by a co-worker) and stare at me openly, because hey, I was just a gaijin, openly displaying emotion which invited everyone in to participate? In the end, they decided to stare at me outright, all the while I was on the platform and during the train journey. By the time we’d reached the main station, I’d finished the book, dried my tears, and turned to the women beaming and said loudly, ‘It was so good!’ Upon which they turned away and pretended to ignore me – with sidelong glances. From a writing standpoint, I love the diary format that she chose to use. It made the book very personal to me, and helped me to really get inside the protagonist’s head.