So Little Time

One winter day, while I stood in line at Barnes & Noble to pick up a book they’d ordered for me, a well coiffed, well-dressed, white-haired lady stopped four feet away to wipe the hint of tears from her eyes. We connected somehow when she caressed the little green sack holding the book she had just purchased.

“It’s a terrible place,” she said, sniffling. We connected further.

“You want to buy the whole store, right?” I asked.

She could only shake her head up and down while daubing at the fresh tears that I’d caused. As she walked away, with a step much younger than her years, she murmured, “So little time, so little time.” I have often felt like crying over the same dilemma, so many books, with so little time to read them.

I thought about Joyce Carol Oates who actually writes fiction as she stands in line in public places, even at a party if no one talks with her. If I had been writing a story in a notebook as I waited in line that day, I would have missed this quirky conversation and the character I could now claim in a story. I most likely would never create her from scratch, for I would hardly expect a character to talk exactly that way and shed tears over that particular plight.

But she could appear in a story of mine just as I have described her, little green sack, tears, and all, without an invitation from me, just as my other characters do. I don’t create any of them, for when I first meet them, they already exist, with their own names, complete, with a whole life history behind them, and with much to tell me. Of course, they all carry baggage that they must sort out by the end of the story. If Mrs. Coif arrives in my story with the baggage of so little time, she will work it out or not work it out; it is not the author’s job to do so for her. While she will never appear as my protagonist, she could show up in a bookstore scene where the action is, and the whole next page will write itself. On that page perhaps I can add what I wanted to say to her but did not: “You can’t buy the store, for I want it.” But really saying that to her would have ruined her moment of epiphany.

With that coiffed white hair above the rosy cheeks and nearly tear-closed eyes, and in a neat tan double-breasted topcoat, buttoned up against the cold weather she was to face in about one minute—I felt I knew her. But I wasn’t inside her head. For the moment she can be only a minor character, but believe me, she plays her role well.

A bookstore is a great place to meet characters. Just watch them, eavesdrop on them, connect with them, and then go home and write—if that’s what you do.