Readers of this column frequently ask me where I find my materials. They also wonder if I worry about not having anything to write about.
To the first question, the short answer is – largely from my own daily experience. To the second, I usually respond “no,” except that I sometimes feel pressure when the time available for writing is short.
Running out of things to write about is impossible in a world so large and full of event and personality. This world is alive with action and interaction, and these motions lie ripe for picking. Every time I set forth from my house I open myself to encounters with the potential for reflection. And also when I stay home.
Becoming a columnist has changed the way I look at the world. Expecting to write each week heightens my inner sense of possibility and allows me to find meaning in events that otherwise would pass without my noticing them. Having this angle on the world drives me to sift an encounter with a friend whose name I cannot remember. A conversation with a stranger, as the two of us wait for a thunderstorm to blow over,has the same effect.
As too many people have already recognized, I can be a dangerous guy to talk with. My habit of taking interior notes on conversations often leads to publication. No wonder certain friends have taken to labeling certain remarks as off the record.
However, I take pains to protect privacy. Some columns have died in my computer without ever having seen the light of day. And I often disguise people or indicate that I am using pseudonyms if people have not given me permission to use their real names.
In my view, the best single benefit of writing is discovering what you did not know you knew. I resonate with Donald Murray’s provocative statement: “We write what we do not mean to write and find a meaning greater than we could have dreamt.”
For this reason I often think that almost everyone could benefit from writing. To me, it is like daily swimming or walking: both activities are so beneficial that I sometimes wonder why everyone does not do them. Physical exercise almost always makes you feel better about yourself and your world; literary efforts, no matter how modest or halting, can put you in better possession of yourself.
Heightened awareness brought by writing makes me alert to the drama in people’s lives. If I had not inquired about the physical disabilities evident in a woman named Julie Favre, I would never have discovered how, when she was a student at Radcliffe in the 1970s, she threw herself from the roof of a college building, suffered severe and permanent injuries, only to discover God and an entirely new set of values and style of life.
Some columns write themselves inside my head. A chance event can provoke me to turn ideas over and over until their fuller meaning emerges. That happened one day when I was accosted by a person resentful of something written by a dear friend who happens to be a fellow columnist. By the time I arrived home, the column was ready to emerge from my head fully grown.
Like walking, swimming often stimulates good ideas. A few laps up and down the lane sometimes enable me to sort out ideas that were entangled and full of knots. And, of course, good writers stir me to develop my own ideas and ways of giving expression to them.
Readers often propose excellent topics. A July, 2001 column, for example, arose from two friends suggesting that I write about their fathers, both naval veterans of World War II. It led to a piece appropriate for Veterans’ Day.
Another reader suggested my visiting the house in Brookline where Jack Kennedy was born. This visit turned out to be fascinating in itself and, I like to think, interesting to readers. No one, however, urged me to write about my activities in opposition to the Vietnam War, writing that attracted a lot of grief for me.
Some readers have sent me documents that proved fine sources for columns. A young man, for example, who spoke at his grandfather’s funeral allowed me to use the list of maxims for finding value in life that his grandfather used to repeat. The old man’s daughter also shared with me her father’s account of his activities for the World War II resistance movement in France.
I have cited here only a few out of many other contributions that readers have made to my journalistic life.
One final confession: of late, I am tempted to include a deliberate mistake in each column. Finding errors wakes up many readers and, though they disguise it, they seem to enjoy catching me wrong. Perhaps I will add a “Find the Lurking Mistake” feature to each of my writings so that readers can stay entertained.
Richard Griffin