Listening In

Editor's note: Each month, the CCW blog features one of our members. This month, Melanie Rigney reflects on how writing means being nosy.

Did anyone ever tell you to mind your own business? Forget that noise if you’re a writer! You’re almost professionally obligated to watch and listen to complete strangers.

Being a writer gives you permission to eavesdrop. By listening to strangers in public places, you develop an ear for regional dialect and for the differences in the way men and women, seniors and Gen Xers talk. It makes for stronger, more believable dialogue. It’s also a marvelous way to pick up physical tics—the guy who shoves his glasses up with the palm of his hand rather than his fingertips or the woman who uses hand sanitizer five times between two Metro stops.

I offer two example I pledge are true:

At O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, the twentysomething woman seated across from me at the gate pulled out her phone: “Yo. I’m calling out sick tomorrow. I’m on my way to Philly on account of my cousin going on trial for killing her baby.” (Silence, followed by groan and rolled eyes.) “Of course she did it, fool. You think I’d be going if she was innocent?”

By coincidence, a few months later at Philadelphia’s

30th Street

Amtrak Station, an unassuming woman in her thirties dressed for the office sat down at the table next to me one late afternoon. Sipping from a bottle of water in front of Taco Bell, she picked up her phone and made a call: “Hello, honey? Just wanted to let you know I’m at the Olive Garden with the girls. Not sure when I’ll be home.” After another minute or two, she ended the call… and walked away.

In my mind, she became the protagonist in a short story, a shy woman so desperate to convince her husband she had girlfriends that she pretended to go out to dinner while whiling away a few hours with a good book at the station. I don’t know if that’s the truth, or if it was her final call to “honey.” But I do know I’m sure glad I had a notebook with me that night!