Grasshopper Sunday 3/26/2023: The Power of Conversation

Yes, that means talking to strangers

Photo by Metin Ozer on Unsplash

When I wrote out the date for this edition in my title I realized it was coming out on my birthday. If you want to celebrate with me, you can buy me a coffee, or better yet, consider a paid subscription. Either way I’ll try to pay it forward.

Conversation. If reading is essential to becoming a better writer, talking to a variety of people is equally important. Last night I met a successful young influencer and his team and it was a great opportunity to discover more about a generation I don’t have enough contact with.

I’m pretty clear about what kinds of things I write about because some of them can be controversial and potentially divisive. I do spend a fair amount of time talking to strangers who are passing through the busy hotel next to my building. For some reason it is a place very conducive to meeting people from many walks of life.

Max, the young man I met last night, was there filming an event with his team. The place was jammed so we found ourselves sitting on lobby couches facing each other and the conversation immediately jumped into high gear, hitting politics, some wacky theories of his, and writing. We got about an hour into the conversation when he asked if I knew his mom.

I told him I did but I knew his father better, having done various business initiatives with him. I knew they had conflicts and it turned out he had not spoken with his father for over a year. Then I got his side of the story after hearing the other side as he grew up.

Fortunately I had disconnected with his father myself for some of the reasons he did. So the conversation took a much more personal turn, unexpectedly. It was a memorable one.

You’re mining fertile ground when you share thoughts with others and hear their perspectives, especially when they may not be similar to your own. I think both Max and I took advantage of speaking to a generation we don’t often get to interact with.

I’d never met a legendary influencer (two million followers on either IG or TikTok, likely both) and found him to be very down to earth. Politics is one of his things and apparently he and his crew went to the G20 summit in India last year.

If you’d told me earlier in the evening that I would meet a former juvenile delinquent who matured enough to attend a G20 Summit representing his generation, I’d have laughed. But I have learned over the years that many unexpected outcomes come out of casual encounters when one or the other delves a little deeper into whatever topic we’re talking about.

It’s right up there with writing and interacting with readers for me.

Don’t judge your characters

That line popped out at me on something I was reading about writing. It caught my attention, because pre-judging people is almost never a great idea and my characters are people to me, people who often seem to develop their own ideas about where the story is going.

I learned to be open to my characters doing things I had not foreseen. It’s one of those mysteries that emerge when you immerse yourself deep into the imagination. In my fiction I may have a general idea where things are going but I’m not stuck to an outline.

If you follow a thread as you write that seems to have arrived from a different place than you expected, go with it. If it turns out to be a dead end, there’s always the delete key.

I exercise that delete key when I find myself judging my characters’ actions. Strange as it may seem, that judgment can keep you from following the path the story is trying to take you on. Those are the fun parts.

Censorship hits near home

This week a rural/suburban school district in my area was shut down twice because of bomb threats because the district has one book in their library. That book, titled This Book is Gay apparently angered some nut enough to cause evacuation of over 4000 students, the entire school district population.

The email, which was sent to local news outlets, apparently was sent from a .ru domain in Russia. It could be a site designed to forward emails anonymously. The sender claimed they had set pipe bombs at all the schools. No bombs were found.

All writers should be alarmed at these attacks on books and freedom of speech. They are not one off events, they are a movement among some right wing groups who are spreading fear and hatred. This incident could have originated in Russia but is likely a local using the Russian forwarding site.

Conversation between strangers is a powerful way to fight this kind of hate. It’s much harder to fear or hate a person we have spoken with as peers.

I hate introducing politics into The Grasshopper, but these political events threaten the work of all creatives including writers. A school principal in Florida, the center of government censorship, was fired after showing students a photo of Michelangelo’s masterpiece sculpture David. The nude statue apparently horrified some parents, despite being one of the most heralded works of art in the world.

If you write, you cannot take our ability to freely speak our minds for granted. I know I could be locked up in many countries for the political writing I do. It’s easy to forget that a practice we take as normal here is being threatened. Taking free speech away is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, not some kind of moral cleansing.

Sorry if I veer off into preaching. It won’t be a regular practice here but it is extremely relevant to the writing lifestyle issues and pleasures covered here.

Sunday Editions have been free for March but return to paid Money Editions next week, when I cover freelance Content Marketing.

Did you write today?

Martin Edic

997 words