Lifestyle: Annie Fay Blog

Cascades

11/24/2019

original illustration

I spend the majority of my week generating creative content for class. Whether I am writing an essay, workshopping with my peers, submitting manuscripts, or analyzing stories there is always a focus on idea generation.

Where do ideas come from? And how, exactly, do authors find their inspiration?

When I’m not writing for a class, I gravitate towards creative nonfiction. This genre is fun because it’s based on facts, but you can also lie. For some reason, I hear that definition in John Mulaney’s voice, don’t you?

This past week I have worked on consistently collecting material. I have been jotting down my observations whenever I can, treating my sentences like sketches. While what I am sharing today is by no means polished, this post is meant to demonstrate how I find inspiration and generate ideas. Blank pages are intimidating, but by simply recording the world as I see it, I can easily generate material to refine and explore further in the future.

These little notes are like excerpts from a field journal—they are initial observations, judgements, and thoughts all jumbled together. This is just one example of my process as a writer. I am always curious to read about how artists come up with new ideas and I hope you’re curious too (:

THE STORM AND THE LAGOON:

The gradient of grays across the sky are reflected in the once blue lagoon. The black ducks wade like isolated islands on the water’s surface, all spread out. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them like it bothers me. It’s oppressive. I pull the sleeves of my thrifted gray sweatshirt over my goosebump covered wrists. The yellows and browns in the marshland look bright in contrast to the sky. The clouds shoot up from behind the mountains like summits made of mist. Droplets of water cascade onto my water bottle and stick to my eyebrows. I veer left towards a tree, a sanctuary for a few seconds as I continue to walk. I don’t know why I chose to hike in the rain.

Maybe it’s the smell of damp dirt or the omnipresent sound of an unseen family of frogs croaking.

Orbs of water cling to the bridge of my nose and drip onto my upper lip mimicking the droplets of water hovering on the rounded edges of tree branches.

The plants seem much happier in this season than I do. The water doesn’t weigh them down, it allows them to grow taller. Maybe the reason I’m not in bloom is because I’m moving too fast through the landscape. Maybe, if like the saltgrass, I stayed grounded in one place under the rainy sky, I would manage to grow too.

I don’t even stop long on the thought. I’m mesmerized by dried strands of wet red and orange bark that look like thick silk ribbons on the ground. Lost goldfish crackers swim on the muddy path—a murky brown river. The ground smells like vanilla cake batter.

I leave the lagoon and once I’m driving through the rain, rather than walking, I remember the first time I drove through a lightning storm. It felt like the whole world could crumble away into unbearable whiteness around me and only my denim blue car would remain precariously perched on a road with no end and no beginning.

As I approach a red light next to a school bus full of kids, I imagine them all slugging each other at the sight of my car. I’ve never seen anyone do this, though.

I drove to the beach in the rain. A flock of a hundred black birds in silhouette darted across a glowing opening in the sky. To me, they looked like the flecks of blueberry left behind inside the blender the day after I made a smoothie. I get out of the car and the particular kind of cold in the air surprises me. It’s the kind of cold that stings my knuckles and turns my palms pink.

In the café I order mint tea and a warmed chocolate croissant. The tea is served in glass pots with metal filters inside holding the loose tea leaves accompanied by matching glass tea cups. They recently changed the glasses from traditional looking tea cups with curved handles to these shot glass shaped ones. They remind me of beakers for a science experiment. I haven’t been in a science class in three years though.

I like watching the different people who come into Lofty despite the rain. It takes a lot of effort for people in California to leave their homes if the weather isn’t shining. I know this because I can hardly believe I left my house. I guess it’s because my outfit is cute and I never get to wear layers. And by layers I mean there’s a cardigan, mostly unbuttoned, over my bralette. And I’m wearing socks!! I mean, come on.

There are only seven other customers here. Three of them are clustered together talking in a language I don’t understand. Maybe Italian? The rest of us are spread out, isolated at our own tables like the ducks I watched at the lagoon. At least I don’t have headphones in. Unlike everyone else, I can hear the weird jazzy elevator music they’re choosing to play today.

I don’t get why people go out in public just to put headphones in their ears? I could do what I’m doing here at home, but the ambiance is different here, and it requires all of my senses to fully experience the benefits. I tasted the mint tea and the buttery layers of dough. I can smell the coffee and rain. I can feel the grease on my fingers tapping on the keyboard. I can hear everyone’s accents over the music and the whir of frothing housemade milks—coconut, cashew, oat—you name it.

It’s funny to see people smiling into their phone screens.

I just heard someone ask the barista for the time. What an outdated question!

I feel like I could fall asleep. Like the weather is convincing me that it’s bed time and not 4:51 in the afternoon. A few weeks ago it would have been two or three hours until the sun would set. But I don’t think she even put the effort in to rise today. If she did, I have yet to see her.

The cold brew drips. Four glass contraptions are stacked one on top of the other. At the top there’s a cylinder a quarter of the way full of water that dribbles into a smaller cylinder full of almost-black coffee grounds. What looks like clear liquid drips into a spiral of glass tubes, like straws that come in novelty cups at the zoo, into a big circular glass vase where the liquid becomes coffee—brown as the dirt outside and the grout between the white morrocan tiles beneath the countertop.

People wear all different kinds of shoes. I have on black Doc Martens with black laces I had to take out of a pair of my little sister’s old Converse. A different woman is wearing black low tops herself. A young man, about my age, is wearing leather moccasins with grey crew socks dotted and bordered in blue. It’s 57 degrees outside but some people have fur-lined coats on inside or raincoats draped over the backs of their chairs. Okay, the raincoat I can understand. Nobody knows how to drive the first rain of the year either. Leaving my neighborhood, staring at the oncoming traffic like a stampede of horses, I saw a red car steaming with smoke from the hood facing traffic in a bush on the shoulder of the road. Sirens blared over Little Dragon in the car.

It’s so dark outside.

I like the guy working here and the girl too. He has blond scruff on his face matching his nest of blond hair in a bun at the top of his head. I’m not at all surprised by his Australian accent. The girls vintage Levi’s fit her perfectly and she has eclipses for eyes.

I hear the train go by before I see it.

The second round of tea is always grainier. Maybe the new round of hot water makes the tea leaves finer and they seep from the impossibly tiny pores in the filter? The little black specks dance and swirl in the glass before settling to the bottom as I pour the tree sap colored liquid into my glass. It reminds me of Coraline and I wonder what my tea leaves say. Probably nothing. They’re not really that kind. I drink them up.

A broom brushes the floor and it sounds like when horses or donkeys kick at dirt with their hooves.

We comment on the time change to remind ourselves that we’re all in this together. The Australian man (he’s from Melbourne) says he’s going to smash a bottle of red wine and stare into a crackling fire. It’s picturesque, romantic even. But I don’t have time to linger on the imagery. He clarifies, jokingly, that he’s going to smash wine into a trash can and light a fire at the beach.

This is what happens when I’m the only one still here.

AFTER THE STORM:

Scattered sticks decorate the sidewalk. I avoided stepping on the cracks. The soles of my shoes are still caked in mud from running in the rain.

There’s a piece of cauliflower on the ground. I’m less concerned about the littering and more concerned about whoever thinks cauliflower is a fun hiking snack.

The blue water is scintillating today as if homes with diamond roofs are just beneath the surface. I imagine that the lagoon is really a giant fish bowl. Instead of sand, the bottom must be decorated with translucent pink glass stones and fish are probably drifting through castles and pirates’ treasure chests.

Silver balloons in a tree.

As you can see, some of these ideas feel complete and others are mere fragments. I save all of it.

It’s easy to be honest when you’re an observer. You record what you see.

When I am working on a fiction piece or random project, it’s always helpful to have notes like this to refer to. It helps my characters to feel authentic.

From this particular set of notes, I am particularly drawn to the rainy settings, the imagery of the kids on the school bus, the thoughts about tea leaves, and the concept of the lagoon as a giant fishbowl. This is helpful for me to note, because when I have writer’s block or get stuck on a project, I can take some of this material into consideration. I keep a list of concepts on my phone as well.

If you would love to write more but can’t find the time, I’d recommend jotting down your observations like this. For me this is an effortless way to generate content and it always gets my brain working. When I am focused on feeling inspired I end up viewing the world with more clarity and attention.

original illustration

© Annie Fay Meitchik. All Rights Reserved. All content on anniefay.com is my own or credit is given when applicable, please do not use any of my images before contacting me above or @ anniefaymeitchik@gmail.com.

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Awestruck, She Whispered

7/28/2019

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This past week in my Mechanics of Writing class we were asked to read "The Lottery" (1948) by Shirley Jackson and then write our own stories with surprise endings. This is mine. Enjoy.

Awestruck, She Whispered

Elowen delicately lifted a pearly white hand towards the crystal doorknob. With a subtle twirl of the wrist, the door swung ajar. The open threshold acted as a window into a new world. Awestruck, she whispered, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” And she truly hadn’t.

Before her, hills stretched out as far as the eye could see. Except, unlike the grass covered hills she was accustomed to, these hills were purple and soft lilac colored feathers sprouted from the earth. Elowen took two steps beyond the doorway, and immediately began to float mere inches above the ground. What she thought were butterflies dusted past her but on closer examination she noticed that they were giraffes, only an inch or two in height with colorful wings like those of a monarch.

Elowen’s doe-like eyes followed the whimsical creatures in wonder before settling on the sky. This sky was such a peculiar thing. All at once, a wave seemed to roll out of nowhere and a pelican swooped gracefully over the ripple, catching a fish in it’s mouth—upside down. In other areas of the sky, where Elowen expected clouds to drift past, patches of green grass shot up, housing trees which towered down from the sky above.

Elowen playfully ran her fingertips across the leaf of a willow tree, and to her astonishment, each of the green leaves danced at her touch, as if they were being tickled. Once they settled, their color collectively shifted to a happier shade of peach. At the sight of it, Elowen thought aloud, “Peaches sound lovely right now.” As her words left her tongue, a juicy aroma entered her flared nostrils. She inhaled with eyes closed. All of the air, sky, and sea around her smelled of peach pancakes.

She heard someone calling her name from the house and noticed a thin wisp of smoke making its way towards the ocean from the chimney. “Pancakes,” Elowen laughed.

= =

“Pancakes!” she yelled, “Elowen, breakfast is ready.”

Elowen sleepily replied, “Of course, mom!” before snoozing the alarm on her nightstand, “Just 15 more minutes…”