December 27, 2024
I’ve always been a curious person. I find people interesting. I’m a writer, an archivist of stories. I ask a lot of follow-up questions.
This has gotten me into situations with people in the past who assume my questions are because I have romantic intentions instead of just establishing a character profile, exploring the climactic moment, finding the base plot of their story. Yes, I’ve gotten into that jam several times in my life, but as an adult, with significant lived experience, now I understand others’ perceptions aren’t my responsibility, after all, they were free to ask their own follow-up questions.
I’m a collector.
One of my favorite examples of collecting is being in a Perkins with another writer, over a decade ago. Our conversation triggered our creative curiosity, and we both pulled out our pens and wrote down the exchange that had just happened in our little notebooks we always kept on us for moments like this - free game for either of us to use, as I believe all stories are. We would see which of us would get there first, see if this exchange would fit into a story somehow for one of us.
I wrote this piece about that moment, and I will leave it here with these questions for you:
Do you believe all moments are free game for creatives as I do?
Do you ask the right questions to learn deeply about a moment?
Do you release your curiosity often enough?
Restaurants With Past Lovers (Whom Are Also Writers)
In the words from the mouth of Bowie, he and Mick Jagger were lovers. It is Christmas time and we have gotten together at that one restaurant the way we do sometimes to exchange gifts. There is no proof that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were lovers, I tell him, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that they were not.
Will they say that about us? I ask. It is probably not a good idea for two writers to carry on, especially if they have great ambitions to be famous.
•
I say, over eggs and hash browns, I have adored the author since I saw him wear two different dark colored socks at a reading, and he asks if I think the author did it on purpose. I say, No, he is probably just colorblind. He says, No poet can be colorblind, and I know instantly I will use that line some day in a poem, but I didn’t yet know how.
•
We sit in Perkins and I say something that catches us and because we are both writers, we take out our notebooks and pens and scribble it down.
That line is lost somewhere now but the thought still holds.
Book Recommendation:
If you are curious like me, or would like to become more so, I recommend A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer. It can help you learn how to use curiosity to spark creativity.
