Striking Chords

Having a baby is moving to a foreign land. Old customs and language no longer apply. Time moves differently, or, there is no time, but some new mysterious substance you travel through tentatively, ecstatically. You experience daily the small and large before unknown. So, this, too, is possible, you think. And you marvel: other people have known this all along.

In that way, it stirs around the thick mental soup, dislodges ideas once stuck to the sides. Like staring down into a new river in a new city in a new country, travel in baby land can make the mind feel fertile, though enfogged, thoughts fresh. Simple things, like deciphering a bus system, like soothing your baby to sleep, are emboldening, the satisfactions seeming not quite commensurate with the deeds.

At The New Yorker Festival a few years back, I heard Deborah Treisman interview Alice Munro, who said that when her children were small she couldn't write for all the reasons one can't write with small children, but that while they were napping she would pour herself a cup of coffee, and sit at her kitchen table and think about writing, and that this time of thinking about writing was not only necessary, but in some way useful, a kind of storing up, hoarding, priming, whatever the metaphor—good. I like this image of the consummate storyteller, hands wrapped around mug for warmth, very still, brewing. She also said that when she started publishing the local paper ran a story headlined: "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories." I appreciate the feat of this now. What I might have read as patronizing a few years ago, I now find truly headline-worthy.

All this to say, I have ideas, but not the whatever it is necessary to turn the embryo of an idea into a fully formed story, a "new mother" or "grandmother" into a human being with life experiences, hair color, and furniture. For now, I can only sit at the table with the mug and mull.

But I know the writer in me is still there, and am reassured when I find her, each time I come across some moment or event in the world that resonates in a certain deep, spinal way. I think all writers have this striking of chords, this internal thrumming, that alerts them to the presence of something that might work in their work. Something true which belongs in their fiction. (One can see that this cliche, to strike a chord, started life so happily, so rightly, capturing precisely that strange physical moment of recognition. I feel sad for its demise, as I do whenever I see "a shock of white hair," which is incredibly often, in places that really ought to know better, but still, one sees how good it once was at describing just that.)

I felt the thrum a month or so ago when I read an article in The New York Times Magazine about two high school boys who have won a prestigious science prize for creating software that can recognize emotion, can tell when you are angry, or sad, or excited. The boys are best friends as well as collaborators, superstars as well as nerds, and throughout the time they were building this digital-sadness-meter, the father of one of the boys has been gravely ill.

I can imagine so many wonderful and devastating versions of this story. A Karen Russell story. A Rivka Galchen story. A Nellie Hermann story. And somewhere out there in the great beyond, maybe even a story of my own.