The littlest things
My writing is often about the littlest things. A tiny moment. A quietly developing relationship. A walk through the streets of Fitzroy. The Fitzroy Diaries, my audio series, was developed from observations made while I walked down the street with a brand new baby strapped to me. Years later, when I was presenting to that baby’s year three class about story-writing, a kid stuck his hand high in the air and asked, ‘Why do you write? What does it do for the world?’
Had it been a movie, it would have cut to my face. Cut back to the kid. My face. The kid. A real “out of the mouths of babes” moment. I’m not sure I stuttered, exactly, but I muttered, for sure. Something about how sometimes words can convince people of things, words can right wrongs. The teacher, a quiet bloke with an unshakeable sense of calm about him, asked if he could interrupt.
“Another reason to write, though, is to entertain, isn’t it?” he asked me, the expert. “To make people feel things. To validate their feelings or distract them or make them laugh.”
Not since Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a middle-aged man looked so much like an angel.
I haven’t forgotten this exchange, because that’s exactly what my writing strives to do, but in defending the noble work of writing, I picked up the biggest tool I could find and bludgeoned my audience with the idea that words are worthy and important.
Sometimes they are the opposite and how delightful.
So I’m hoping if I think of little things, I might pop them here, for now. You can comment down below if you’d like.
Some word-photographs from my week:
Yesterday an old friend stood at my doorway playing Tina Turner at the highest volume imaginable by way of alerting me that it was time to go and eat pancakes. Friends. In a moment I had to myself today, I thought about the miracle of friendships. How some stick and some don’t. How you can know your office mate intimately for three years and then never see them again until you bump into them at a farmer’s market and now they have two kids. Today another friend bought me noodles and did an impression that was so funny it made me suddenly unable to cope with the chilli in my soup.
I made the po-faced woman at the medical reception of a place I go to hoot a laugh so surprising the woman next to her put someone on hold to ask if she was okay.
A little person asked me, ‘What was before us?’
The school administrator called me for the second time that day to alert me of a medical incident at the school. My child had, she said, ‘left sickbay, said a fond farewell, and then walked into a tree’.
It’s the little things.