The following is a cross-post from my other Substack, Farsighted, which I write with my husband, Cortland Wolfe. As some readers may know, we’ve been on the road for the last two months, living and working out of a tiny trailer. (If you want to know what this trip is all about, read Welcome to Farsighted.) Last week, we moved into a small house on the edge of Pitcher Pond in Lincolnville, Maine. I’m posting this slightly edited version of this Farsighted post here, because a key to compelling writing — on the page or for the ear — are those crystalline moments that we access through all of our senses. They wake us up from autopilot, striking our hearts (or our guts). If we’re paying attention, they offer us gifts of insight. Writing can be so much more alive, so much more fulfilling, if we train ourselves to observe and capture these moments, despite their very impermanence. If we develop the habit of looking at life through this lens, our writing will be better and truer for it. Perhaps our lives will be richer as well.
It is quiet this morning, as it always is and will be here on Pitcher Pond. I glance at my phone. It is 6:00. From the hall, Cort gently lifts the old-fashioned latch on the bedroom door, but I am already getting up. He’s getting his fleece jacket. “I’m going outside to take photos,” he says. “You have to see this.”
I pull the thin grey curtains aside. On the pond, fog rises spectacularly off the water, the slight rays of dawn illuminating its movement. I catch my breath.
Cort leaves to take pictures and to try to catch a fish off the dock.
I see his silhouette, black against the water, and hurry into my own fleece. I step out onto the deck and snap photos, trying to capture the mystery and awe of a moment that will not last.
This particular moment — Cort casting his rod out over the water, the half-light, the columns of steam levitating off the pond, the reflections of the sky in the water — none of this has been here before, has ever appeared exactly this way before. Nor will it again. This knowledge, a joy with a shadow of sadness, enhances the moment.
Ten minutes later, the sun rises, blazing, blinding. It lights up the opposite bank, the plastic swim floaties tied to our dock, the now yolk-yellow swimming platform still anchored on this first day of autumn off of our neighbor’s cottage.
I hurry out again, trying to catch and hold yet another moment before it, too, is gone, transformed into whatever it will become next.
This is truly what we have in life — moments to be noticed and captured in whatever way we can. Savored, or perhaps grieved, but felt. Over time, the accumulation of some of those moments become relationships with special people and places. Strings of moments, like pearls found within Maine’s rough oyster shells, become stories — the stories of our lives and the stories we investigate and those we tell.
I am learning how to get the most out of life on this voyage of discovery — how to get the most out of the moments that shimmer and bead them on a string. That string reaches back before I was here, before all of us who are here now were here. Like peering into the morning fog, I can see, faintly, that this collection will continue to be strung with new pearls, new shimmering moments, after we are gone.
Life is breathtaking.
Try this in your studio
The other night, we had dinner with a couple we had just met. Over fried haddock and burgers, Dionne and Bart told us about their new lives in midcoast Maine. They had left Denver (our current home) three years ago, moving to a house on a lonely peninsula in Penobscot Bay, in a town of 1,200 people. We spent an hour learning about their adjustment from the mountain west to northern New England. When we got to dessert, I asked, “What’s a single day, or a single moment, that stands out to you? What was the best one? And the worst?”
Everybody drew in their breaths.
“Tough question!” Dionne said.
“Just pick the first thing that comes to mind,” I said. “It’s a game. They can be really small.”
Silence. She looked down at the tablecloth. Then, a sudden beaming smile as a scene revealed itself.
Dionne is the organist at her church. She also hires musicians for special events. On Christmas Eve, she said, “I sat at the organ playing gathering music for 15 minutes, along with the best violinist I’ve ever heard.”
Dionne’s husband, Bart, had a moment of his own — a worst one. Last winter, severe storms struck midcoast Maine and did tremendous damage. Bart found himself on a local street in freezing weather, trapped in his car between two downed power lines, unable to move while he waited for help. It took a couple of hours. While he waited, he had no idea when help might arrive.
In an hour of conversation, these are the two stories that I’ll remember from the evening, the ones I will now associate with Dionne and Bart and with this place. Because they are scenes. Something happened, and they were deeply felt.
So try this in your studio: The next time you do an interview, toward the end, ask:
What was the best moment of that experience?
What was the worst?
If the best/worst construction doesn’t apply to the topic at hand, alter the question. Ask instead, “What’s the most vivid moment you remember about [your topic]?”
If you are the protagonist of your story, turn the tables and ask yourself these questions. Close your eyes and simply wait for the answers; don’t force them. Investigate them with each of your senses, as if in the present: What do you see? Hear? Smell? Taste? Touch?
Write down the answers. Don’t censor yourself. Reflect on the scene you’ve recalled. What does it mean to you?
I hope you are surprised by the answers, as I was by the stories we heard from Dionne and Bart in a dark Irish pub on a chilly autumn night on the coast of Maine.
If you’re courageous, share the results of this exercise here in the comments.
I’ll be back on Sunday, September 29, with a regular edition of Sound Judgment.
As always, it is a joy to be with you.
Elaine