Essay

Stranger than Fiction

by Suzanne Zeviar

A tap on the door interrupted the silence one recent Sunday morning, which found me alternating my attention between the newspaper, a copy of the Writer in the Combat Zone, a recent issue of Writer’s Digest, and my computer screen—where coherent sentences were straining to emerge from snippets of random thought.

My emotions, as usual, were on a similar circuit—propelled by conflicting levels of inspiration, self-confidence, self-doubt, and self-pity. The inspiration usually comes from reading other people’s good writing and articles about other writers’ similar struggles. The self-confidence comes when I’m past the 80 percent mark on any given project, or when an editor calls me to accept an idea. The self-doubt emerges shortly after the 100 percent mark on any given project (upon the realization that I have to begin a new one); and the self-pity comes and goes at random.

On this particular morning, I was reading and thinking about inspiration, and ideas—where they come from, and how to capture them before they slip away. I think the last sentence I read before answering the door was: "The most successful collaborations are between people who have a story to tell and don’t know how to tell it, and people who do know how to tell it but don’t have the story." I arrived at the door rumpled and rooster-tailed, somewhat relieved to see the plumber’s amiable mug peering back at me. Normally, letting contractors into my domain, especially when I am home alone, is not something I feel terribly comfortable with. But having spent several hours listening to this fellow’s cheerful prattle the week before, I welcomed the interruption to my brooding.

"Got your new faucet, your basic up-down-right-left job. It’s average," he announced. "Not a really expensive one, but not bad. I wouldn’t let him get a crappy one," he added, referring to my landlord, who has a propensity for picking crappy ones and forgetting to tell me when plumbers are coming to install new faucets.

"You’re a packrat, just like my wife," he started in, as he began unloading the jammed cupboard beneath my bathroom sink. This was a guy who loved his wife. If I was counting, I may have reached the twenty or thirty mark when tallying his mentions of her on his previous visit. I had also observed the notable patience that he had displayed while trying to communicate with my landlord, whose broken English can turn soup to nuts in no time flat. They had spent hours attempting to locate the source of a leak; then later—one upstairs, one down—trying to feed some piping through from top to bottom, through my ceiling, blindly, hollering directives at each other with very little success. I know I would have been grinding my teeth somewhere into hour one. You wouldn’t expect this guy to be patient. His imposing frame, booming voice, and generally rough appearance drummed up more of a biker/tough-guy kind of image.

So, with the plumber’s arrival (I’ll call him Mitch), I temporarily abandoned my brainstorming, and plunked myself at the table with my crossword puzzle—an activity that does not suffer from regular interruption. Did I mention that he never stopped talking for more than forty-two seconds when he was here last? Well, he didn’t and he didn’t seem to care whether I was fully listening. I’m not complaining though—given that I work alone most of the time, his banter provided a needed change of pace.

"So, what do you write about?" asks Mitch within minutes of his arrival.

"Oh, this, that ..." bla bla bla, I answer, vaguely.

"I’ve always thought I should write about my life," he continues, "but I don’t know quite how to put it down." My eye twitches nervously; I fear the onset of a wanna-be writer conversation with a person who has probably never tried. But Mitch is OK, so I don’t make up an excuse to leave the room.

"My old man was nuts eh," he begins, sprawling himself out on my bathroom floor. My ears perk up.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, he saw his buddy hacked up in the saw at the mill when he was younger. I figure that’s what did it. The guy was hollering for my dad to help, but he couldn’t get to him. I guess he was never the same after that. You know how kids play house—well, we used to play house, but we used to get out knives and stuff, and set traps—basically dreaming up ways to kill my father—that’s what we played, all the time. It never occurred to us that it wasn’t normal."

My whole body perks up. "He was abusive, obviously," I venture warily.

"Oh yeah—beat us up, cursed us constantly, and came and went as he pleased. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for weeks, and then he would suddenly return. One time he came home and told us that he was dying of cancer. Then he went to bed for about a month and made us all wait on him hand and foot. We patiently waited for him to die but he never did. Instead he just got up and left again one day. We didn’t see him again for two months. Nobody ever mentioned the cancer again.

"I guess that was one of the weirdest times, but mostly because it was the only time he wasn’t violent. I guess that’s why we believed him—I mean he was always violent. Thank God there were ten of us, because we saved each other on many occasions. I’m sure he would have killed us if he wasn’t outnumbered."

"You can’t be serious—you really thought he would kill you?"

"Yeah, but what the hell, that’s life. We see him now and again walking around downtown. If he sees one of us, he points his umbrella at us and makes machine gun noises." Big booming laugh. "Oh, and you want to hear something really funny, all of us kids are plumbers, except one sister, and she’s married to a plumber. Funny huh?"

"Uh, yeah. Did anyone turn out badly, I mean, coming from all that . . ."

"Oh no, we’ve all got families, and we’re pretty close . . ."

OK, so you get the picture—this guy had a story. And of course, this article isn’t about Mitch—it’s about stories, characters, and ideas. Mitch reminded me that stories are everywhere, and that truth is indeed, stranger than fiction. He also reminded me that characters can come from anywhere, survive anything, and defy all probabilities. They can also crumble and disintegrate and split from reality forever when life deals them more than they can make sense of. Nothing is too extreme to be realistic.

After Mitch fixed my faucet, I had a renewed sense of inspiration for my latest novel—a story in which one character is psychopathic, but is never discovered; another is diagnosed as schizophrenic, but isn’t; and yet another is destroyed by psychiatric drugs that she never needed in the first place. Shortly after Mitch left, I reworked one of the principle characters whom I had previously taken great pains to make believable. She’s deliciously unbelievable now, and so much more interesting.

I’ve developed a whole new attitude. I go out of my way to chat with the neighbors I used to avoid (they’re OK, I’m just a recluse), the mail-carriers, the quacky daycare lady on the corner. Actually, it would be more accurate to say I go out of my way to listen to them more—I don’t chat much—but that hasn’t stopped anyone. Given half a chance, many people will divulge the most amazing things in the course of a casual conversation. A few succinct questions thrown in midstream can fill in the blanks, and there you have it—a character. Now, bloat her up or tone her down, add a situation, and you have a story—or at least you’re thinking about a story.

Of course, you shouldn’t run amok exploiting your acquaintances’ lives at a whim—but you can use them as a launching pad. As for me, I bought a new tape recorder for when Mitch comes back next week. We think we’ve got the makings of a really great book!

Suzanne Zeviar is a writer in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work has been published in The Vancouver Sun and Local Women Magazine.