Dear Writer: Please Write About My Cat

I find there are certain downsides to being “one who writes.” (I still feel awkward and embarrassed calling myself a “writer,” because I feel haven’t earned the title yet.)

One such downside: annoyance when someone (my grandma, or an old classmate I run into by accident) goes, “You should write a story about that!” and it’s something dumb, like getting cut off in traffic, or their cat, and I go, “Ha! Maybe. That could be interesting.” (Translation: Hell will freeze over first.)

It can be equally irritating when people ask, “You’re not going to put me in a story, are you?” Or worse, “You should totally put me in a story.”

The biggest question I want to ask any of these people is why. Why write about your cat or your life or how peanut butter is literally the best thing invented. If they can’t answer, my point is made. If they give me an interesting angle or anecdote, I want to tell them, so you write it, that’s yours.

I think I know why I write—I think it has something to do with human contact, a simple act of seeing people and trying to understand. We tend to trivialize people and relationships often with our instagram/snapchat/@InstaSpazzyChat#iheartgrammar#sarcasmisntfunny world.  I get depressed to imagine my brain hosting a library of people I have known that are confined to the physical structures of their "books," the simple facts about them (or maybe the things they’ve “liked” or the things they “follow”). So I try to let people know, if I can, that I do see more.  And probably, so do others.

And maybe that’s one of the particular rewards of being “one who writes.”

This past Sunday I was having a coffee with an old friend, and since we were struggling to find things to talk about after years of growing apart, he started showing me pictures on his phone from his vacations in Hong Kong.  In one of the pictures, I saw another person I recognized—a guy named Joe I had crossed paths with for one brief month of my life a year ago.  How very random/unlikely/amazing.  I’d barely thought of him in months.

But then I started thinking about all the things I remembered about him, the things I’d thought of him.  He had a fixation with oranges.  He was a barely contained ball of energy.

And almost by accident, I wrote words and words and images and dialogue about Life and Time and Relationships.  I may have also mentioned ginger-and-beet flavored smoothies.  Only at the end did I even mention Joe, and that all this had been triggered by seeing him in a picture.  And then, because why not, I sent it to him.

His response:

I’m in tears right now and I don’t even know why. 

(I should add, Joe never asked me to write about him.)

I want to tell people: I may never write about your cat. Or your job. Or your proposal-story. You might have to tell those stories yourself. But that doesn't mean you’ll never find something or someone you recognize.  That doesn’t mean what I write is not, in some way, about you.

 -Lissa Horneber, Creative Nonfiction Editor at Blue Earth Review