Scene: The Blue Anchor Bar in Twin Bridges, Montana, population 400.  (Truth in advertising: my stepdaughter owns the bar.) It’s Friday night. I order Moose Drool beer.  M. tells me her husband just bought a truck on e-Bay and flew to Pittsburg this morning to pick it up and drive it back to Montana. I tell C. that I like her silver necklaces and she says, still smiling at me, she lost her son and his ashes are in the silver cross. A new guy tells me he just married C’s daughter and they’re moving to Alaska in a few days. It’s taken him awhile to know that she was the right one to marry, he was waiting for a sign. "Agreeing to move to Alaska wasn’t enough of a sign?" I ask. He says no, it wasn’t until she got herself baptized that he realized she was the one.  Rumors are flying: N. isn’t going through with the wedding because of the dogs, and P’s boyfriend is going to donate a kidney to J. When I get home I write all this stuff down. And when I do I realize I have material for my novel.

A few days later as I head home with my husband, the second leg of our flight to L.A. is delayed out of Salt Lake City.  We go to the Squatter’s Pub in the airport and I order a Polygamous Brew. Why stop with just one when you can have more? reads the ad for this beer. (Truly, that’s the name of the beer and the slogan verbatim.)  There’s a guy at the table next to us on his cell. "It was a nightmare," he’s saying into the phone. "Just a fucking nightmare." Our lunch comes and I lose track of his conversation. Then I hear, ""The mattress! I mean what could we do?"  I tune in again. "It was awful. We stripped it but it was ruined.  There was a cleaning deposit of like $1800. So I told Mom we’d call 1-800-Mattress.  And we did!  We got a new mattress."  (I have my notebook out now.  "What are you doing?" asks my husband. "Shhh," I say.) "I couldn’t believe I was in my dad’s house," the guy on the phone says. "It was a nightmare. But it got worse!"  Apparently his mother had taken something inadvertantly from the dad’s house that involved a gun. All hell broke loose when she went through security in Tucson.  Sirens, bells, whistles, cops.  She misses her flight to La Guardia – she’s rerouted through Dallas then Nashville. "A fucking nightmare," the guy keeps saying. I sit there shamelessly writing all this down like a spy.

Why am I telling you this? Because you lose the amazing stories you overhear, the dialog, the glimpses into other people’s lives, if you don’t carry around a notebook and write it down – shameless as this might be. It’s what writers do. It’s where fiction comes from. Filling in the blanks to the stories and dialog.  Why is P’s boyfriend giving his kidney to someone he hardly knows?  How did the dogs sabatoage N’s wedding?  What happened to the mattress?  This is what you get to find out when you write fiction.

To Do: Go to your local cafe or bar or wherever people hang out in your town, and write down what you overhear. Don’t judge. Write it all down, even what you think might be boring.  You’ll be surprised.

Coming soon: Student Spotlights and more of the Writing Clinic.