I’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”—
But, nah. I don’t think everyone, not even every writer, “just has to” do almost anything, much less experience the sort of off-the-wall moment I did one afternoon, years ago. And even less than that, to actually follow up on it.
This was back in the days when I was living on my savings and trying to Be a Fulltime Writer. (If you notice the contradiction in terms there, on either side of the and, you’re not the only one.) I was reading the paper one day after lunch. It had been a productive morning writing session, and I was feeling a bit burnt-out but still not quite ready to toss away the afternoon on something other than writing. Just, y’know, not necessarily that writing — what I was working on every day.
So I was reading the paper, as I said, and my attention was caught by the Ann Landers advice column on the page opposite the comics. “Dear Ann Landers,” it began (they all began that way). “I was a closet smoker who went through a pack a day for 20 years and tried to quit dozens of times. I failed because I felt as if I was depriving myself of a great deal of pleasure even though I knew in my heart that cigarettes were killing me…”
To this point, a fairly conventional letter. Yet even as you read of this guy’s struggle with the Tobacco Demon, you could sense, lurking in the wings, a but. You could sense he wasn’t writing to seek advice. He was writing to offer it.
And so he did.
Something about the solution he came up with just suddenly struck me as bizarre. Flat-out hilarious, even. I’d been a smoker myself, and the thought that I might actually employ this solution back then, on the occasions when I’d most wanted a cigarette, just, well, it just unhinged me.
For no reason in the world that I could put my finger on, I suddenly conceived a short story — an epistolary short story — written in the voice of someone from somewhere other than the USA. I mean, someone, y’know, truly… foreign. Someone, say, from…
…from England. It was the voice of a young woman. Yes…
…a young woman, slightly daft as they say, prone to giddiness and vague excitements…
She’d be well-off…
…and she’d be accompanied by a nurse… on her first visit to America…
Well, things got a little crazy — slightly daft, in fact — when I returned to the word processor. But it’s still one of the stories I had the most fun writing, and one of the writing sessions most memorable to me for how quickly the first draft emerged.
Sometimes I can’t help myself. I just have to relax, have fun, and go with the words as they happen, y’know?
I can’t really explain how this all came about (obviously). But, for what it’s worth — including the heart of the Ann Landers letter, verbatim — here’s “Hearing from Maisie.”
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