Tip 4 for Creative Growth: Talk to Strangers
(The gift of a yellow corduroy hat and a chat with a climate scientist)
Welcome back to my seven week series on Creative Growth. In Week 1 I urged us to Cherish our Inimitability; in Week 2 to Live a Creative Life; in Week 3 to Invite Ourselves into a Community of Good Fortune. Today, my advice, my favourite of the seven, is to Talk to Strangers.
I know our moms told us not to do this but I’m suggesting that, for the purposes of our creative growth, we ignore them.
Many of us writers are introverts. Some of us, like me, are ambiverts – hugely sociable and also in deep need of withdrawal and alone time. A few of us are outright extroverts, though that’s rare, I’ve found, amongst artists. Whatever our social identification, I think it’s important to talk to people. To friends and family, sure. But more – for our creative lives – to strangers.
There’s a lovely no-baggage, un-self-involved, creative openness to how we approach those we don’t know.
We listen better – and more wholeheartedly.
We pick up on new things.
And we’re exposed to parts of the world that we don’t always come across in our day to day lives.
Being willing to engage with strangers also taps into a kind of humility and openness that is essential to creative growth.
In her commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, the novelist, Ann Patchett, spoke about how engaging in the lives of others, sometimes unexpectedly, is a deep source of learning:
“…a lesson that I never stop having to learn: to pay attention to the things that I’ll probably never need to know, to listen carefully to the people who look as if they have nothing to teach me, to see school as something that goes on everywhere, all the time, not just in libraries but in parking lots, in airports, in trees.”
In her reference to trees, Ann Patchett also reminds us that those who have something to teach us are not just people. That we can learn from everything around us, including the natural world. More on that next week.
The magic of meeting people is one of the reasons I love writing in coffee shops. Coffee shops are full of strangers. Hang around long enough, and those strangers might become friends. Some of my dearest friends (on both sides of the Atlantic) come from coffee shop encounters.
But fear not, even when strangers have become friends, there are always more strangers who come along.
There are strangers at bus stops.
In the lines at the grocery store.
At the hairdresser’s.
The doctor’s office.
When you take a hike on an unfamiliar trail or walk around a new city.
Lift your head and strangers are in plentiful supply. And, creatively speaking, they are your best friend.
They crack you open.
They shift your gaze.
They ignite something.
Get practised in asking open questions. People enjoy talking about themselves and appreciate genuine curiosity. I particularly love getting people talking about one of their passions or hobbies, their profession, something they feel strongly about or have committed their lives to.
It’s very rare that I get a grumpy: ‘Leave me alone’ response and for every one of those, you’ll get a hundred enriching conversations.
And, because I think that ideas and creativity hold a magical, magnetic quality, I believe that strangers are often put in our way to give us creative gifts. Something you can bring back to your work. Something that will enrich it. Something that will make you and it grow.
The yellow corduroy cap worn by one of my characters in my debut, What Milo Saw, was worn by an old man on a bus in England who I spoke to one rainy afternoon on my way to a writing session in a coffee shop. The cap and the man became the foundation for one my most loveable characters.
Talking to strangers also allows a degree of serendipity into our creative lives.
When you’re working on a project, you may notice apparent coincidences appearing more often than randomness allows – almost as if there’s another hand guiding yours in a certain direction. Strangers hand us gifts from the universe that enlarge our understanding of what we’re creating.
I know that this might sound a little woo woo, but I’ll give you a recent example which might win you over.
I spent the last year living in Oxford and would write in a coffee shop in one of England’s oldest bookstores – Blackwell’s. One of those low-ceilinged, thick-beamed, oozing with history places. The café was full of Oxford students, professors, writers, thinkers and other people drawn to bookish, cosy places.
As an extra bit of advice, when it comes to meeting strangers, I’d highly recommend spending some time in cafés attached to bookstores – they attract a particularly magical breed of stranger.
Well, I was sitting in the café one day, playing around with an idea for a novel. It was that early stage where you feel giddy with excitement at all the ideas rushing in and what they could lead to – but also terrified that you’re deluding yourself and that maybe it’s a heap of rubbish that no one will ever be interested in or want to read.
The novel, which I’ve written a few chapters of, is set in the immediate future. I’m interested in climate change but not in an apocalyptic, end of the humanity as we know it, sense. I’m more interested in tipping points, moments that feel both real and precarious.
I’m interested in the future of my children. Of how they’ll be living in a world where climate change – if we continue our trajectory – will be irreversible. A world that will be hotter and wetter and wilder and less predictable. Parts of it under water, other parts unhabitable. But most people, I imagine, will still be living a seemingly normal life, within those challenging parameters.
Anyway, a man sat beside me in my Oxford coffee shop. Bicycle clips around his ankles. A helmet under his arm. He pulled out his computer and a stack of books. I immediately got those lovely, writerly-thinkerly-bookish vibes from him.
I can’t remember how the conversation started. I probably asked a nosy question about one his books (asking someone about what they’re reading is a great way to accost a stranger). One thing led to another. And pretty soon I discovered that he previously worked for Greenpeace and was a climate scientist and activist.
His Instagram handle is @climategeorge.
I’m not kidding.
After I’d recovered from the serendipity of George sitting next to me, just as I was working on an idea for a novel that was his life’s work, I started asking questions. The biggest of which was:
‘Can I tell you about a premise for a novel and you tell me, from your professional understanding of climate science, whether it’s plausible?’
He listened kindly and attentively and then said:
‘Yes, absolutely. The world you describe will probably be with us around 2075.’
There you have it, friends. Talk to strangers. They might gift you the image of a yellow corduroy hat or share their life’s work – or just become a really good friend.
Writing Prompt
Continuing with the vibe of talking to strangers, here’s a lovely, laconic, enigmatic poem by e.e.cummings about those fleeing yet profound encounters we have with strangers when we feel deeply seen and so fully ourselves.
If Strangers meet by e.e.cummings
if strangers meet
life begins-
not poor not rich
(only aware)
kind neither
nor cruel
(only complete)
i not not you
not possible;
only truthful
-truthfully,once
if strangers(who
deep our most are
selves)touch:
forever
(and so to dark)
Prompt: Write about an encounter you’ve had with a stranger, either a fleeing one, which had a profound experience on you and left you changed in some way, or one which lead to a deeper relationship. Try to recreate the exact moment of the meeting, the setting, the weather, where you were and how you were feeling - engage all your senses.
Adapt Your Writing Prompt
Imagine one of the characters you’re working on having a chance encounter and how that impacts them (or both them and the stranger). How does it change the characters involved? How does it advance the story, the plot? How does it tap into some of the themes of your story? There’s the well worn trop of ‘the stranger comes to town’ in fiction (think of Westerns), and how that can upend everything. It’s definitely worth playing with.
Recommendation
I’ve been dipping into Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. I love Adam Gopnik’s thinking and writing and am always fascinated by the notion of mastery, of becoming brilliant in a particular field. In the opening chapters he gives us a particularly interesting take on how those we see as true masters and geniuses: he suggests that they’re not so much marked by their advanced skills (many of us are very skilled at what we do), but somehow by their uniqueness, their idiosyncrasy, their vulnerability, their (very much in line with my 1st Tip for Creative Growth) imitability.
Quotation to Chew Over this Week:
“We search in the arts not simply for signs of skill, which are, if not easily taught, still teachable. We search for signs of a unique human presence: it’s why we love vibrato in a voice, legato in piano performance, why we catalog the tics and mannerism of a baseball player at bat…We never really love an artist’s virtuosity, or if we do, it feels empty. We love their vibrato, their unique way of entangling their learned virtuosity within their unique vulnerability.”
The Real Work, Adam Gopnik
Coming up Next Week
Tune in next week for my 5th Tip on Creative Growth.
With love, dear friends and keep writing - and keep inviting yourself into that community of good fortune.
Virginia🤍
Virginia Macgregor is the author of five novels for adults and two for young adults. She has an MFA in Creative Writing with a specialisation in the teaching of writing. She lives with her husband, her three children, her four cats and a home full of books and coffee mugs, in New Hampshire.
I studied abroad one year in Norwich, England and remember standing in a queue/line to get on a bus. Another student I didn’t know was standing there, waiting, as well. I am so glad I talked to her. We ended up becoming close friends and enriching each other’s lives. Thank you for having us take a trip through memory lane, Virginia, and for encouraging us to keep talking to strangers :-).