Ideas Are Everywhere

For the last several months, our city has been installing new sidewalks and water pipes. This has meant shutting down long sections of major streets and bringing in many pieces of big equipment while macadam is torn up, sewer drains are moved, and water pipes are replaced. We awake at seven in the morning to heavy drills and tin drums rolling around.

Because our section of the street is the widest, the construction crew has been storing dozens of granite curbs and other items in this section. Trucks travel back and forth tamping down temporary trenches, sending up swirls of dirt. Our sidewalks are torn up, plastic barrels narrow the street even more, and our driveways are shut off for days, even weeks, at a time. The lines for cable and the telephone are scattered across the dirt, and one neighbor, with two young school-age children, lost both for over a week. Apparently these lines going to be reinstalled about two inches below the surface, without the protection of plastic pipes or depth below the ground.

And through it all I have the same thought: if people really wonder where my ideas as a writer come from, they should look out my window. I have imagined hapless construction workers clearing the lawn to lay out the new sidewalk and digging up a body. I have turned carelessly buried plastic water bottles into bags of stolen gems haphazardly lost and now gone forever, or until . . . I have imagined neighbors arguing endlessly with City Hall about the path of the new sidewalk, all in a desperate attempt to prevent someone from digging up—what? The trash collector is required to come before seven in the morning, and at that early hour, before we have full light, is witness to more than he should know about.

If you want to know where I get my ideas, just look out my window. Or better yet, take a walk through the neighborhood. Ideas are everywhere.

Ruminations on the Back Burner

The sign that I'm finishing up the novel I'm working on is the way ideas start flowing for new books. Sometimes it's another crime novel, so I let the story grow, noting some of the details that are emerging, but otherwise I just ignore the whole thing until I'm finished with the one I'm working on. But sometimes it's a book idea that is unexpected. I have a number of these and I'm not sure what to do with them.

Graham Greene wrote a number of essays in addition to his novels and "entertainments," and in one collection he included short summaries of novels he never got around to writing--story ideas that felt full enough to capture his imagination just enough to inspire him to write them down. When I read these short treatments, I could feel the energy in them that would have been the narrative drive moving the story along. These were story ideas that worked. He doesn't say why he didn't write them, just that he didn't.

I have a list of ongoing projects, but some of them have been ongoing for years. A couple of them are actually complete--story collections, including one for Anita Ray stories, a novella set in India, a memoir about my years in India including a reminiscence of Lakshmee Amma, who died this fall in her eighties, and another book on the family farm (both real and imagined and also ideal) that dominated my family's life in one way or another for over a hundred years. I'm not sure these books will ever be written, but they hang around in my imagination like a task that I've been saving because it's more fun than work--gardening, making a special dish, hunting down research materials.

It would be terrific if I could just say, I have enough ideas to last me for a lifetime, which is true, but there's something more to this. When I read Graham Greene's summaries of his unwritten books, I could sense they were real and possible to him at that time. When I write summaries of my ideas, they also feel real and possible as I write them. But when I return months, even years later, I sense how I felt when I wrote the summary but I no longer feel the same way. Perhaps I could get back into the frame of mind that brought the ideas to the page, but maybe not. Perhaps those ideas have their time, and when the time is passed, it's best to move on.

I'll keep adding to my list, reviewing it, and think about reviving one or more of the projects, but when I feel an idea demanding to be worked on now, that's what I'll do. The others will wait, right where I left them, sitting on my desktop.