Conversation with a Friend

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Hi friends.

All I’m doing lately is creating a steady stream of ideas and that’s OK and maybe even GREAT. I’m waiting on copyedits for my novel, which should show up in the next month or two, and I still need to stay in the world of that book, so I don’t want to get too deep into my new project. I just want to play around, be gentle, until I can let the other book go officially and give my mind over to something new.

Anyway, isn’t it just lovely to feel free and let your pen move without any obligations for it to go anywhere specific? Not everything has to become an end product. Sometimes we just have to scribble away and never look back at what we wrote. Sometimes we just have to light a candle in order to blow it out.

Another approach I have been thinking about is that when I sit down with my pen and journal, I am simply just catching up with a friend. I want that same warm, easy vibe as when you meet up with someone that you are close with but don’t see that often, maybe for coffee or lunch, in a sunny space. You know it’s just going to be a pleasant chat, filling in all the blanks and just checking in and catching up.

I was thinking about this because last week I was in Brooklyn for just 24 hours so I only had time to see Maris for a BLT at Tom’s Restaurant, and our lunch together was just like that. Talking to her is simple and enjoyable because we’ve known each other for more than a decade and are always regularly aware of how the other person is doing. An old, consistent friendship. Even though we haven’t lived in the same place for a long time, she will always be important to me. How we treasure those kinds of friendships, don’t we? How wonderful it is to chat with those people in our lives.

But also Maris is a professional conversationalist, and she reads everything, and she is a deep thinker, and she is honest, but also light and funny, just a very lovable person, and so we meandered together easily. And we could talk about our dogs for hours. It was a nice lunch.

Then a few days later I was back home and sitting at Baby’s, thinking about the characters I’m gently approaching for my new book, and I came up with a little experiment. I will treat these characters as friends, I thought. I will, in my imagination, sit them with at lunch or for a coffee. And then I will write about the experience of seeing this friend while also channeling the feeling of seeing a friend into my work. Writing it, feeling it. Loose and easy from multiple directions.

Then I started to extend that to more active prompts about these characters. I wrote down some ideas for scenes, the buildup, the details, sort of fill-in-the-blank moments, where anything could happen. These were some of the things I came up with:

1. I decide to meet a friend, a beloved friend, for coffee. I suggest the place. Then I am dressing to meet them, wearing something specific I know they will like because I want to please them. Then I am traveling to get there, and I am sitting and waiting until they arrive, observing the space around me, glancing at my phone on occasion. When they arrive, we will embrace, and I will think about the way that feels.

2. After a while my friend starts to tell me something important, about a problem they have, and I am being present for them. I am not checking my phone once. I am just being there. I am neutral. I am listening. It is easy to listen to that person. I want to be a good listener.

3. Two days later, I am repeating that story to someone else, and I am letting my judgement of it creep in, and my relationship with the person I am telling it to is also altering the truth of the story. It’s not a lie, but it’s not quite what I originally heard, either.

4. A month later, I receive a message from my friend and they tell me how they resolved the problem. I am neutral again. I am just listening. But later, I will have a specific feeling about the resolution. And I’ll think it’s OK. It’s OK to feel this way.

5. Now I will write all of this instead from my friend’s perspective. Their physical approach to the cafe as they walk up to it, their sense of the cafe itself. Then they share the problem, and later, solve the problem. I will write it quickly without thinking too hard about it. And I will see if a new truth emerges.

Some bonus bits that popped into my notes: a hungover barista, a woman with a small yappy dog sitting at the counter, an ex-lover I didn’t expect to see, a man asking for spare change for the bus, a new couple showing up for coffee after their first sleepover, some out-of-towners asking for directions, a studious man wearing glasses and holding a thick book, a girl with a yoga mat ordering the largest coffee available, a teenager who changes clothes in the bathroom and walks out without purchasing anything. It was just a list I scribbled down. Again, not thinking too hard about it. I just liked the possibility of all these moving parts. Maybe they weren’t parts. Maybe they were also new friends.

Anyway: it was just a little experiment. Just sit and wait and feel a certain way. Let my mood impact the writing. Then dump a character into a moment where I could get to know them a little better. Where things were easy and we felt glad to see each other and even if something was wrong, if one of us were listening, then things would be OK. As long as we listened. As long we were there for each other. Then, maybe, the story could begin.

Jami

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