Greetings, writers—
Do you borrow people’s stories for your own stories or poems? Do you write about people you know—and if you do, do you disguise them?
“I always pulp my acquaintances before serving them up,” said 19th century novelist Frances Trollope. “You would never recognize a pig in a sausage.” 1
My partner, on the other hand, has been known to use more recognizable slabs of people in his work. “There’s inherent pulping in turning a person into language,” he says, “but I’d cop to some undigested bits on occasion.”
I like to write down other people’s stories, and the funny or scandalous things my friends say, but this stuff merely sits in my journal and amuses me whenever I open it. Once I followed a woman through Fred Meyer so I could eavesdrop on the phone conversation she was having. “It was a good thing I was right there when I died,” was the line that caught my attention. I could hear her friend on other end, too. “You what?” she screamed. “Oh, yeah, I died,” the woman said as she pushed her cart down the canned vegetables aisle. She was so matter-of-fact about it. “I saw a garden and pink light and everyone I loved. I didn’t see God or Jesus or anything.”
I wanted to hear more, but the friend was suddenly doing all the talking and I worried I might be acting creepy, so I grabbed my Muir Glen tomatoes and left.
Sit in a cafe and eavesdrop; write down what people say and use it to tell a story/learn about dialogue/practice being not creepy/whatever—it’s an extremely familiar writing assignment, which is why I’m not giving it to you, though by all means do it if you want to.
But eavesdropping, listening intently when you’re actually being spoken to, and writing down things so that you’ll remember them are all fine writerly habits to get into.
“I eat up the stories other people tell about their lives,” says Rebecca Makkai2. “I’m not sitting there going, ‘Oh, I'm going use that in a story’ but some tiny corner of that becomes part of something that happens in a book, not in a way that person would even recognize. But if my job is to write about humans in the world, why would I not be constantly filling that gas tank with human experience and interaction?”
Today, think of something someone has told you about their life. Use it, digested or not, in a scene, a chapter, a story, or a poem.
Trollope was the author of more than 100 books, including what has been called the first anti-slavery novel, 1836’s Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw.
Author of The Great Believers, I Have Some Questions for You, The Borrower, and others.