by Gail M Feldman

Created on: September 18, 2010

Grist for the Mill

Nothing is useless or irrelevant to the creative process. Everything is grist for the writer's mill. I tell myself this often, but not so much when I am a reluctant miller as when my life gets gristly.

Folks tell me my life is interesting, even bizarre. "My life is boring," they complain, or utter in relief. "Nothing ever happens to me." Nonsense! Everyone who breathes has strange and awesome things happening to him or her, all the time. The trick is to pay attention, and how tricky can that be?

All right, I admit that paying this kind of attention has its downside. I'm late everywhere I go because if I see a squirrel with a nut in its mouth running up the side of a Toyota I just have to stop and laugh aloud. "That's not a tree, you goof!" If looks could kill, the Minneapolis police would be interrogating squirrels right now and I would be writing this from an urn. There is a tree on my street that hasn't lost its glorious orange leaves yet, although all the trees around it are sadly bare. I wonder how many of my neighbors were peering out their windows at me while I was peering up at the tree, asking it whom it'd paid to hold onto its jewels just a bit longer! (I wonder how many of them heard the answer?) One of these days I'm going to get myself locked away thanks to my habit of standing as still as I can, one arm out in front of me, an offered perch, whenever I see a butterfly. No, not all of this ends up as a detail in a story, poem or script. Yes, all of this ends up in the brain and colors our way of looking at things. No one is really a creator. The paints exist in the tube because someone mixed them and put them there, but even so, that someone didn't magic up the raw elements. The materials for the brush exist somewhere. Whatever language we write in, that language exists before we use it. It's our way of looking at things that makes things happen in a way we call creative.

One weekend in 1977 an extremely handsome male friend of mine tried to hitchhike home across the George Washington bridge from D.C. into Virginia. Two guys in a convertible picked him up and drove him the wrong way. When they tried to rape him, he jumped out of the moving car and escaped down some pretty rough terrain into a woods and spent the night there listening to these creeps searching for him, calling him, taunting him. In the morning, when his ordeal was over, the cops pretty much told him to forget it; they weren't getting involved. Their mistake. How uncreative of them.

The following Monday my friend told me about his awful weekend, wildly dramatizing an already highly dramatic story. I listened sympathetically and then it occurred to me that there was a bright side to all this. "Well," I offered, "at least you're a writer. You can write something about this. What would you do if you were a plumber? Would could you do? You could go home and say, 'Wow, that was scary. My life is changed. I think I'll fix a pipe.'"

I still don't understand why he wasn't pleased with my answer.

Oh well. I got a good poem out of it, myself.

Got writer's block? Chop onions!

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