A good story is like a good lie. There needs to be just enough truth shoring up the fiction so that the made–up parts seem plausible. So, as a professional liar (let’s face it, all fiction writers can claim that title), I’m always looking for little bits of truth to insert into a story.
Sometimes, I get really lucky, and the idea fairy appears. Maybe in the form of a dream—at least two of my books were developed based on stories that came to me in my sleep—or just one of those OMG moments that occur out of the blue. In my case, usually while I’m driving.
But, more commonly, there is some external trigger. A magazine article. A radio story. An overheard conversation.
Oh, did I mention that, in addition to being a professional liar, I am also an eavesdropper? Yup, I listen in on conversations that have nothing to do with me. The more intimate and horrifying, the better. There was a time when overhearing the embarrassing details of another person’s life and/or relationships made me uncomfortable.
Now I take notes.
I was recently skimming through some random entries in the small binder I keep in my purse, and was reminded of a conversation I overheard in a restaurant at least five years ago. The friend with whom I was having dinner at Les Halles in Coral Gables was doing his best to ignore the family sitting next to us. There were two parents and two teenaged children. The adults were openly discussing the marital infidelities of a family friend. The son, who I estimated to be about fourteen, interrupted them in an aggrieved tone. “You shouldn’t be talking about this stuff in front of me,” he wailed. “I’m just a child!”
Since I was accustomed to fourteen-year-olds saying precisely the opposite, this made me laugh out loud. To my dinner companion’s horror, I took out a notebook and recorded the entire conversation.
The subjects that catch my interest do not always do me the favor of sitting still while I spy on, er, I mean observe them. Sometimes I have to follow them.
I’ve trailed an elderly woman dressed from head to toe in at least seven clashing shades of green (including her fingernails and hair highlights) through a shopping mall. I’ve followed a man in a top hat through several subway cars. And then there’s Rocko.
Readers of Beg for Mercy will recall Sukey’s disastrous boyfriend—the one who gave her a heroin overdose and dumped her at the emergency room. He’s based on a real person. There was a café near the company where I worked when I was writing the first draft of the book, and there was a man (not named Rocko) who would come in there from time to time. He was so ridiculously obnoxious, and so completely un-self-aware about it, that I was completely fascinated by him. (The line I gave Rocko in that first scene in Jimbo’s Bar – “Fighting gives me a hard-on.”—was actually something I heard him say.)
I was having brunch at a Cuban café in South Miami one morning when a sudden rain storm swept through—one of those frog-strangling up-ended buckets of rain that only appears in the in tropics. A woman was walking down the sidewalk and ducked under the edge of the restaurant’s awning to get out of it. I was eating at the covered patio, and could see that the hostess was not pleased to see an obese, bedroom-slipper-clad black woman with a wild nest of unkempt dreadlocks standing in full view of his guests, but she was also not going to send her out into the downpour. She motioned toward a spot out of the way of the front door, and the woman stood there, gazing out into the rain.
Most of the patrons ignored her, but I watched her, taking in every detail, and turning it into a story. Why was she out, dressed in a light shift and fuzzy slippers, on a sidewalk in an exclusive section of South Miami? She didn’t look homeless, she looked like someone who had stepped outside in her nightgown and gotten locked out. There was that glint of not-quite-sane in her eye, but she didn’t have a dangerous feel.
Then something magical happened.
The rain began to slacken, and instead of a downpour, it seemed to come down like a curtain. It dripped in continuous lines from the edge of the awning, and the woman laughed delightedly. She then extended her hands and began touching the rivulets of rain as if she was playing the harp. She sang soft lyrics I couldn’t quite understand in creole French, smiling as she plucked her imaginary instrument. Drops of water splashed onto her face and glistened there. As the rain gradually stopped, she finished her song, stepped through the last beads of the vanishing curtain, and disappeared around a corner.
The other diners didn’t see this. They were doing what normal people do—ignoring those who are different, made uncomfortable and embarrassed by the strangeness. Before I became a writer, I would have done the same. And I never would have seen the woman play her magic harp.
There’s a downside to this. People who catch you eavesdropping can react with anything from a harsh stare to an actual confrontation. And the strange ones, accustomed to being avoided, can latch on to you if they catch you watching, and want to be your best friend. Not-Rocko eventually caught on to the fact I was always glancing at him surreptitiously, and concluded that I wanted him. And I didn’t have quite the nerve that Mercy had when she told his alter ego that she made it a policy of only mating with her own species.
For better or worse, since I’ve become a writer, I have a new set of habits. I make things up. I spy. I stalk. Are these things making my life better or worse? I don’t know. But they’ve definitely made it different.