The insatiable desire to peer through windows …

Over the past five years, I’ve come to pride myself on my instinct about fiction writers. I can’t tell who’s going to be a best seller or a dud, but what I can tell, with a reasonable degree of certainty, is which writers will be around in a year or two’s time, and which will already have given up. In other words, I can spot those who will have a long writing life and those who will be a brief, brilliant flash in the pan.

And the key determinant is watching other writers when something interesting happens: if you’re sitting in a pub or a café and a fight starts in the street outside, or wandering along the seafront and pass a particularly well or badly dressed person, or see a mother trying to cope with a child having a tantrum … Writers with staying power tend to lose the thread of the conversation. Their eyes and ears turn to whatever is happening and they focus intensely on the drama in front of them.

When they finally return to ‘reality’ it’s almost always with some thoughts on what they’ve seen, and it’s not usually a straightforward comment like, ‘Did you see that?’ but a much more tangential approach such as, ‘I wonder why she chose that hat’ or ‘Do you think he’s really angry, or is he playing to the audience?’ In other words, they are already shaping narrative out of an unexpected incident and this ability to absorb, transform and re-present the quotidian as fiction is a key marker of a long writing career. For those who aren’t endlessly fascinated by (okay, nosy about) the world around them, the only route to fiction is to plumb their internal resources, and sooner or later, unless they’ve led a particularly fascinating life, they will begin to bore themselves, or bore their readers.

And what have windows got to do with it? Well, my husband points out that whenever I go on a long journey by train, I take my camera and come back with loads of pictures. The first two or three will be glorious scenery: the Kendal countryside or Highland lochs, but after that all the pictures will be blurry images of peoples’ back windows as seen from the train.

“What’s this supposed to be?” He’ll point at a blurred, beige image.

“Oh, that was a woman who was ironing a shirt and talking on her mobile at the same time. I couldn’t help wondering if she was flirting with her lover while pressing her husband’s clothes.”

“And this?”

“A child’s bedroom, with no child in it. The curtains were open and the light was on, but the bed was neatly made. Don’t you think that’s odd, at ten o’clock at night? Perhaps there is no child to come back, perhaps it ran away and the parents have kept the room just as it was …”

And that’s one of my particular addictions, making stories out of what I see from train or bus windows. Glimpses of other people’s lives are endlessly fascinating and feed my desire to write – in fact, if I ever get stuck, I get on the bus and simply sit on the top deck with my moleskine, noting down all the things that interest me. One round trip to somewhere remote can provide a dozen stories, for less than the cost of a cup of good coffee …

5 Comments

  1. Kip de Moll
    22nd October 2008

    Oh Kay,
    this trait you describe absolutely drove my wife mad with jealousy! My eyes constantly roam and stare, my mind drifts off, my attention not riveted to the person in front of me. And if the particular subject happened to be female, it did no good to say “Well, she has a story too!”

    Now living alone, I adore the fertile landscape so much more so than my own vacant brain.

    I wish we had double-deckers and used trains more often.

    Reply
  2. Jim Murdoch
    22nd October 2008

    My wife just bought me a new camera to encourage me to exercise more – another thing we writers suffer from I suspect – and what did I end up showing her? Photos on the Halloween decorations in one of the flats opposite us. I was just testing the zoom – honest. But you’re right. Everything is fodder. In the thing I’m writing/not writing just now the protagonist gets transfixed in a restaurant by what she decides are two gay men breaking up. At least that bit was there in the last draft.

    Reply
  3. Dave King
    26th October 2008

    Great post. Enjoyed reading it.

    Reply
  4. Kay Sexton
    1st November 2008

    Kip, that’s very sad, but I can understand her concern – it takes another writer to know just how cold our fascination with others can be, not sex, purely fiction fodder!

    Jim, I would have done exactly the same – we are kindred spirits.

    Reply
  5. P. A. Moed
    3rd November 2008

    Hi Kay! What a great idea to take pictures of an arresting moment, image, scene. I use photographs a lot when I write, but they’re usually other people’s. I think your idea is terrific.

    Reply

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