Where Writing Comes From

Maddy (now 11) and I head off to Barnes and Noble, to have a drink and a cookie in the cafe and then, if we can find a free armchair, I will read to her while she lies back on my lap with her head on my shoulder.

No armchairs, and the only unoccupied table in the cafe is right in front of the artificial log fire. I suggest she may want to sit on the far side of the table from the fire in case she scorches.

She ignores my suggestion and sits in the chair closest to the fire. “I can take it,” she says. “I’ve been to Costa Rica.”

She says this in a voice that she seems to have invented all by herself. It’s a bit like the movie-preview style of voice that says, “One man. One mission. One hour to save the planet.” In other words, what she would call a dan-dan-dan voice. Except that she says it with a layer of self-mockery that shows she knows she’s being goofy. Costa Rica. Dan dan dan.

“I see,” I say. “So you’re not intimidated by a mere gas fire.”

“Exactly,” she says, in the same voice. She glances over her shoulder at the fire, a look of contempt on her face. “Bring it on,” she tells it.

As we’re about to leave, she realizes she hasn’t brought any of her journals with her. My ears prick up: she must be thinking of writing something. She hasn’t written for several days, so I’m all in favor, and we buy her a nice little hardback journal, ideal for writing in the car.

On our way home, driving in steady rain along a road that skirts the end of the airport, we stop at the end of a long line of traffic. Up ahead, four fire trucks, an ambulance and a police car are pulled up around two cars that have collided and are skewed sideways, almost completely blocking the road in front of Pizza Putt, the pizza-game-arcade-batting-cage-and-indoor-miniature-golf place.

Our line of traffic moves only when someone gives up, peels out of the line, carefully turns in the narrow road and heads back the other way. We’re in no hurry, though, and I have to admit, I’m curious to get a closer look at the accident. Besides, in the back seat, Maddy has got out her journal and is writing. I sit back. The rain keeps falling.

After twenty minutes or so, the ambulance leaves, then one of the fire trucks, and the police and firefighters start waving traffic through, one direction at a time. We move up, then squeeze through the narrow gap between the curb and the pair of cars, which are pretty well locked together but don’t have that horrifying ripped-metal quality, or the dismaying hyper-compression that lets you know at a glance that nobody got out of this one alive.

“The airbags popped out,” Maddy observes as we pass.

She keeps writing all the way home. Back indoors, she shows me what she’s written.

         “Another fire truck blared past my window. It was the thirteenth one today. I watched it go by. Where were they all going? They all seemed to go down Park Avenue, turn right onto Spears Street and then disappear down Cherry Brook Lane. My best friend, Lisa Grindlaw, says she saw twenty fire trucks in one day. But Lisa tends to lie. The most I’ve ever seen is fourteen. Sirens seem to always be blaring in the past few weeks.

         “The strange thing is, you never hear reports about fires in the news or on the radio. No one knows why there are always so many fire trucks, ambulances and police cars around. Besides, it would be hard to start a fire around here. It’s been raining for the past two weeks non stop. Even before then the air was moist and heavy with humidity.

         “My school has been closed for a while, too. I think all the grown ups know something that we don’t. They know what’s going on, but they don’t want to scare us. I’m not allowed out of the house unless I’m going over to Lisa’s house. She lives right next door. My parents say it’s because they don’t want me to catch cold from the rain. ‘But I’m going to get even more sick if I don’t get my fresh air!’ I insist. When that happens my parents open up a window.

         “’There, fresh air,’ they say. I hate being cooped up inside. I love the rain. I love the moist air rain brings with it. I love sitting outside in our garden with an umbrella when it’s raining. The soft pit, pat, pit, pat on my umbrella makes me feel relaxed. I feel peaceful, serene, thoughtful. I don’t think about anything but the sound of the rain on my umbrella and the water droplets caught on rose petals.

         “My favorite place closed today, the miniature golf park. It was flooded. Nobody was going there anyway. I mean, who would play mini golf in the pouring rain? Well, besides me, before my parents banned me from going there. Lisa has been banned, too. We used to go every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Lisa’s parents still allow her to walk to the grocery store. My parents won’t even let me do that.”

I’m stunned by this. She’s converted boredom into fiction, she’s picked up elements from the scene around us and created this remarkable sense of menace, but right in the heart of it she’s placed her own love of the rain, pulled together in one wonderfully economic parallel trio: peaceful, serene, thoughtful. She’s also taken the idea of Pizza Putt and transformed it into an outdoor mini-golf range based on one much closer to our house, which has a dozen water features including waterfalls, and as a result it always looks, from a distance, as though it might be flooded.

Yet she may never write any more to this little chunk of text. I asked her if she had a sense of what was really going on in her story (she knows that I’m not asking her to tell me what’s going to happen, as that reduces the incentive to write it) and she said “Sort of.”

So this may remain a fascinating fragment, or it may develop. I don’t over-discuss it or over-praise it (she hates that) or over-emphasize completion. My job, it seems to me, is simply to make sure she has the chances to take this writing habit out and run it around the park.

There may come a day, though, when some seventh-grade teacher, someone who has never written anything other than report cards and has no idea where good writing comes from, tells her to put this stuff away and work on real writing: the five-paragraph essay, the argument, the college prep. That’s when I’ll start to see red. That’s when someone will have to hold me back.

2006