The Advantages of Being a Writer
Writing is usually an enjoyable activity.
Sometimes it can be like trying to pull quail eggs from a chicken, but mostly it’s a pleasant and gratifying experience.
Plus, there are some advantages.
We can listen to conversations that are not ours all in the name of research, not nosiness.
We can tell people we have to stay home to write the next book/chapter/scene/outline.
We’re never bored because we make up stories about people around us.
Anything and anyone is a story idea and fair game.
We collect details.
We can travel places and bring back nothing but details as souvenirs.
Think of the money saved!
Case in point, we went to New York City way back at the beginning of December.
It was everything I expected it to be during the holidays.
If Christmas doesn’t live in New York City, it definitely has a second home there.
New York City is like a fully fleshed-out character in a novel.
I wish I knew it better to use it as a setting in a future work-in-progress.
Alas, I don’t.
But here are some of the souvenir details I brought back:
• Bicycle cabs decked out with holiday lights and blaring holiday music (All I Want for Christmas! Last Christmas! Feliz Navidad!).
• Sirens, sirens, sirens. The second level of sound underneath Feliz Navidad.
• Horns honking into the gridlock. The third level underneath the sirens.
• The store windows full of tinsel and sparkle and animation and wonder.
• Snippets of languages hanging in the air like tossed confetti.
• Scribners! Random House/Penguin! Scholastic! Harper Collins! (Book nerds unite in my glee.) Deals get done in these places.
• The architecture. Brownstones! The Library! The Churches! The Temples! Some are small and easily overlooked. Others are looming and alive.
• The Plaza (The Way We Were! Eloise!). You just know this iconic building with its old-world charm has stories to tell.
• Tiny bakeries and delis and grocery stores literally everywhere you look. People own these businesses, not corporations (OK, maybe some corporations own some of them, but they all look very Mom-and-Pop-y.).
• So many greenspaces in this amazing city of nearly eight-million people. Little and immense parks with benches and wrought-iron fences, people feeding squirrels, ice-skating rinks. Pathways veering off in all directions.
• Statues! There are nearly 1,000 permanent monuments in New York City. Compare that to the nearly 90 statues and monuments in San Francisco, 100 in Los Angeles, and 500 in Chicago.
• Sidewalk vendors, selling art and “art,” clothing, purses, balloons, pretzels, hotdogs, chestnuts.
• Well-fed pigeons.
• Zero rats. At least on my watch. Where are the rats?
I need to go back for further immersion.
That’s an advantage of being a writer, too: at some point you can write off your travels as a business expense on your taxes.
At some point.
So while I can’t use New York City as a novel setting because I don’t know it well enough (or as a tax write-off), I can always use the details to enhance a fictional city setting.
A place I feel more comfortable using: the Sierra Foothills.
That’s the setting of my current work-in-progress, and a place I called home for more than 25 years.
Granted, it will still be fictionalized, but it will be representative of the foothill towns.
Oh, and did you think I came home without any new books from my NYC trip?
Silly you.
But I’ll share those with you later.
Until next week,
~gail
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Countdown clock: 51 weeks until the end of the year.
Gail,
You are not only a wonderful writer, but a wonderful painter. You painted an incredibly beautiful picture of New York City!
Awww. Thank you, Sherry. I love New York. (That should be a bumper sticker! Haha.)