![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/silentmovie_feldman_sm.gif?resize=250%2C188&ssl=1\" "\\"Marty")
I’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”—<\/p>\nI’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”—<\/p>\n
But, nah. I don’t think everyone, not even every writer, “just has<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, 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<\/em> writing — what I was working on every day.<\/p>\n 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…”<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. You could sense he wasn’t writing to seek advice. He was writing to offer<\/em> it.<\/p>\n And so he did.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n …from England<\/em>. It was the voice of a young woman. Yes…<\/p>\n …a young woman, slightly daft as they say, prone to giddiness and vague excitements…<\/p>\n She’d be well-off…<\/p>\n …and she’d be accompanied by a nurse… on her first visit to America…<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sometimes I can’t help myself. I just have to relax, have fun, and go with the words as they happen, y’know?<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/silentmovie_bancroft_sm.gif?resize=250%2C188&ssl=1\" "\\"Anne")
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<\/em>. Someone, say, from…<\/p>\n