The Writer's Mind

by Sheila Connolly

Several years ago my daughter and I saw the play QED, a play by Peter Parnell, Richard Phillips Feynman and Ralph Leighton, at a theater in New York (it was our "thumb our nose at terrorists" gesture, since we'd never been to New York together before 9/11).  It's essentially a one-man play about Richard Feynman, a brilliant and eccentric scientist who throughout the play battles health problems that will eventually kill him.  I have always remembered a line near the end of the play, when the Feynman character says, "Because I want to see what it's like to die.... If I'm going to die, I want to be there when I do!"

This came home to me once again when I damaged my ankle in Ireland (I promise I will stop dithering on about this, but at the moment the ankle and the cast and the whole collection of paraphernalia for getting around are dominating my life):  there was a distinct moment, after the snap-crunch-pop part, when I took a look at the situation (not pretty) and my writer's brain kicked in.  Okay, this is lousy, but...isn't it interesting?  I almost feel as though I should apologize for not being in dire pain.  I did ask more than one health care professional whether the absence of pain was unusual--and whether I should be send prayers to some guardian angel for sparing me.  But for whatever reason, medical or mystical, the blasted thing didn't hurt, so I could manage to be objective.  At least, as objective as one can be while contemplating a body part that has assumed a contrary life of its own.

Point one:  the aforesaid body part is not supposed to be pointing in that direction (that's as much "ick" as I'll give you).  Therefore I deduce that the solution will require more than a band-aid and an aspirin.

Point two:  I am woefully underequipped with emergency contact numbers and knowledge of official procedures for foreign nationals dealing with medical issues in a non-home country.  Point two sub one:  I have a working cell phone, credit cards, and (ta-da!) my health insurance card (which is more than my husband had), so I had the raw materials to proceed.  And, hey, they speak English in Ireland!

Thus began the Great Adventure, with the Writer's Mind clicking away at a high rate.  Maybe to some people it would seem cold, but I have to say, it's a great way to distance yourself from the crisis, which makes it much easier to deal with.

Somewhere there are people who would collapse into a gooey pile of misery and rant against the unfairness of the universe.  Why me?  they wail.  I have no answer to that, but I am not one of them.  It's useful to know that I don't fall apart in a crisis (aha, more good writing fodder).  Instead I set about solving the problems as they arose.  First, how to get up the stairs and into the car so I can get to the clinic?  Easy:  Husband, drive you the car as close to the door as possible, and I'll slide on my well-padded derriere (okay, lost a little dignity there, but there was no one around to see).  Where to find help?  Husband, I saw a pharmacy at the head of the main square:  go you there and ask for assistance.  And so on.

Like writing a book, scene by scene.  Break down the problem into manageable pieces, and work through them one at a time.  Forget what you think should happen, or the way it would be back home; deal with what comes.  Pay attention to details, not because they're necessarily important, but because they're a useful distraction, and they can fill much of the endless time you spend waiting for the next step to occur.  What do the nurses wear different colored scrubs?  What kind of x-ray equipment do they use?  Ooh, I like those upside-down watches the nurses had pinned to their tops, where they were easy to see and didn't get lost or tangled up in something else. 

The Writer Brain listened to fragments of conversation around me.  The young woman who had been assaulted the night before, and was there with her mother and additional relatives to have a broken finger looked at.  The many victims of sports injuries (have you ever watched a rugby match?  Brutal!), including one who was clearly in shock even to my uneducated eye, and it was no surprise that the triage nurse moved him to the front of the queue.  The older people, brought in by their children, who clearly didn't understand what was happening, couldn't remember the last meds they'd taken, or even the day of the week.  All real and true--and all material for something, sometime.

After we came back home, I told my husband about the Feynman quote, but he didn't get it (and he's a scientist).  But for me it spoke volumes about a deep curiosity about all things.  If you have to die, don't you want to know what it's like?  Would you want to miss the last great act of your life?  If you're a writer, I doubt it.  I know it helped me manage the situation.

You've been very patient, so I'll leave you with a happy picture (while I had two working feet!) from Dublin.  That's me with Molly Malone, aka The Tart with the Cart.

I promise that next week I'll talk about something else, like natural catastrophes.

DEAD THINGS

by Sheila Connolly

This summer my family and I took a quick and unexpected vacation. My daughter had a day or two left of a rental house near the shore in Rhode Island and invited her father and me to join her for a night midweek, so we did. Since we’re rarely this spontaneous, it was both a surprise and a treat. We spent a pleasant afternoon strolling along all but empty beaches, watching people fishing, admiring the nearby lighthouse and shopping for typical beach-town souvenirs. But one of the things that excited me most was finding dead things.

Okay, I’m weird. But I've always been a naturalist at heart, and I love seeing things I've never seen before. The inside of a dead bird's head may not be the first thing that occurs to most people, but when I found a seagull skull, I fascinated. I even took a picture.

And I didn't stop there. At a different beach (to be accurate, the parking lot near the beach), I discovered a desiccated sting ray and was thrilled (and took more pictures). I had only just discovered that there were sting rays in that part of the world, and, presto, there was a large and perfectly preserved specimen that I could study to my heart's content. I thought it was beautifulBelegant, exotic, alien. (I thought it would make a charming addition to the decor surrounding my desk, but my daughter would not let me bring it home.)

Actually I’ve been doing this for years. I have a picture of a huge jellyfish I found washed up on a beach in New Jersey years ago (it was at least a foot across). When my husband and I visited Australia several years ago, I had a marvelous time documenting dead animals: a cockatoo in a tree, a wombat, even an entire cow skeleton. Lest you think I'm totally bonkers, I also took pictures of as many living creatures as I could, but they often move fast and/or keep their distance, so pictures of them can be disappointing. The dead ones hold still.

When I was eight, a friend and I created our own animal graveyard. Some people have healthy hobbies like sports; we instead collected road kill and conducted funerals. No, we did not kill anything, nor were our pets included. We relied on serendipity to provide us with our departed. Once we were very happy to discover four mice that had apparently fallen victim to the same car in a driveway. A quadruple funeral!

In my own defense, I should add that I've talked to several other people who did the same thing when they were young. Maybe there’s something compelling to children about big serious issues like death, especially when they’re often sheltered from the reality. When I was holding those mock funerals, I had never been to one. I didn't see a dead person until I was well into my twenties (and it was an acquaintance, not someone I knew well); I didn't attend a funeral until my grandmother's, and she lived to be 94.

Now I write mysteries, in most of which my protagonist is trying to identify a killer and to bring that person to justice. That is the core of the traditional or cozy mystery: justice is done. Those who kill others maliciously must be identified and stopped. No one should suffer an untimely death, and maybe writing about it in some way rights a wrong.

How Writers Sometimes Handle Death...And It Ain't Always Pretty

By Lonnie Cruse

I was on my way home from a book fair in Evansville, IN, last Saturday evening when I learned of a friend's death. It wasn't totally unexpected. She was quite a few years older than me, and lately she'd had a couple of strokes. But I wasn't expecting it to happen right then. (Do we ever?) We'd been close and she was extremely supportive of my writing.

I wasn't particularly adult in dealing with the news, losing it when we finally reached home, tossing suitcases and laundry in various directions in our driveway while screeching at the innocent bystander I'm married to. And I didn't sleep that night.

By the time the funeral was held on Monday, I'd gotten enough of a grip on myself to indulge in a bit of literal graveyard humor after the graveside service ended by jotting down the interesting names I spotted on nearby headstones for future use as character names. And I journaled my feelings about the wonderful person she was. It's what writers do, take most of what hits us between the eyes and put it somehow into writing. Perhaps I'll create a character like her one day. Perhaps I'll use some of those headstone names in a future book. Perhaps I'll meet her again in the hereafter.

Writers deal with life by writing about it. It's how we make sense of the senseless. And stay one step away from whatever drives others insane.

Some people run screaming into the streets when faced with a notebook full of blank, lined pages. Others write down minute details of their lives, page after page. I've recently learned to journal somewhere in the middle, jotting down quick story ideas, questions about a work in progress, personal problems, anything I need to get out of my head and onto paper to deal with. It helps, both in my writing and just living my life. I won't stop missing my friend just because I journaled about her. The tears are still inside. But she's still here, in my journal. In my mind.

What's inside you that needs to come out?