Every night, someone suggested recently at a writers’ meeting, you write down an event or idea from the day that might be used in a story. Or a poem, I should add. Or essay. Or whatever.
You might call this a writer’s night music, eine kleine Nachtmusik, a la Mozart, if you wish.
Mostly, this exercise is a bit of discipline, a way of reminding yourself that a writer writes every day, willy nilly, sun or rain, conflagration or tornado, in order to build up that night or day music. (When did Shakespeare write King Lear and work up the gods that keep the dreadful pother o’er our heads? During a raging storm, in fact? or a sunny day? does anyone really know and does it matter? He had noted such storms, obviously, maybe played with them, one night or day on parchment, and had them ready to go when Lear was germinating in his head.)
So here’s an idea from today, an image, something to add to the escutcheon that is the story, or poem, or book we would write eventually:
At every street corner, every doctor’s office, every restaurant, there are signs. Signs that we might, with a little attention, take as wonders. I don’t mean as miracles that should direct our lives or tell us where we’re going, simply stuff that someone has written and we might wonder about. Take this example, posted in the clinic where my wife is getting PT for her busted ankle, alas:
What is the distance here, I wonder, between respecting a healthcare worker and attacking him or her? How is respect accorded, and what does it mean? You (maker of signs, maker of wonders) aren’t suggesting here, are you, that a doctor, say, is automatically worth the kind of reverential respect often given? And that if he or she is not, the only option is to attack? (Of course, they may be fending off this aggressive notion preemptively by assuring us that they respect us!)
Okay, okay, such signs are not philosophy, or psychology, are they? Or fine writing, for that matter? Pretty approximate, usually. If healthcare workers have been attacked, or think they’re about to be, not a bad idea to warn aggressive or plain crazy people out there in the waiting (and seething) room.
But how many of us, seeing such signs, don’t gotta wonder what the healthcare workers and administrators are getting at? Hmmm, let’s scratch our heads and think it over.
TBC (as in our next novel or epic poem “Demise of the Healthcare Workers”).