“TMI? Too Much Information. It’s just easier to say 'TMI'. I used to say "don't go there", but that's lame."- Steve Carell as Michael Scot in ‘The Office and American Workplace’
Writers have strange heads.
Not physically misshapen or anything – though I’m sure some do! More like their heads are used slightly differently than regular folk’s heads. It’s the storage area for a million random and unconnected things. What they’ve seen, heard, witnessed or read. Every detail is stored up there… nothing is wasted.
It is a common occurrence for most writers to be told by friends and acquaintances that they are a source of vital bits of useless information. The VBUI. A writer is not a stranger to the exclamation “How/Why do you remember that!”
The simple answer is because that is how they are wired.
Writers are wired to store information. Not just dates and times and happenings and reactions but finite details that maybe go unrecorded by a different mind set: The texture of a blade of grass, the stretch of skin over a cheekbone, the sound of a suppressed thought in a sigh, the colour of fruit about to ripen, the weather on the day they first heard about 9/11, the weight of the cloud surrounding grief, the birth of smile.
When I was a kid, there was a hardware shop on a parade of shops at the bottom of our road. It was run by an old man called Mr Savage, and in keeping with the times the shop was named for him.
Savage’s had a counter somewhere in the shop, but you’d be hard pressed to find it. Every inch of the square footage was filled with stuff. My over riding memory of Savage’s is the precise shade of a brown paper bag. Everything in the shop seemed to be brown. And stacked high. To the rafters.
There was no natural light in the store. The windows were as full of ‘stuff’ as the shop. The door always struggled to open as if the very motion was pushing stock back ways. A small bell was attached to the door and it would tinkle to alert Mr Savage that he had potential trade. He always seemed to just pop-up from the midst of the brown sea of stock.
What always surprised me was that Mr Savage could always within moments lay his hands on what ever it was you came in for, even if you didn’t know exactly what you needed.
But that is an old memory – irrelevant to 21st century living. Retail is a different concept now. A shop like Savages would sink without a trace today. Hardware shops now are well lit, well planned and self-service. They don’t have or even need a Mr Savage to dive into a sea of brown and emerge with just the thing.
However, writers haven’t changed much since Homer’s The Iliad came out in 29 centuries ago. The requirements are much the same – details are remembered then told. In 8BC Homer tells us of Andromache smiling through her tears and of Helen’s beauty being such that a thousand ships sailed to war. Today Alan Hollinghurst tells us of Nick’s special efforts to invent entirely imaginary seductions and how they became as real as memories.
Andromache, Helen of Troy, Nick in ‘Line of Beauty’… none of those people were ever born. None of those people drew breath but when you read of them – those people, their surroundings and experiences are real.
We have the finite detail absorbed from real life by their creators to thank for this illusion.
A writer creates worlds from all the detail they have imbibed. A writers head is full of all the stuff that is normally forgotten, all the stuff that that everyone else tidies away.
Writers never know what they may need to refer to in order to create, so they store it all. They watch, they listen, in order record the stuff that in day to day life would be deemed to be too much information.
Writers will always have too much stock, like Mr Savages shop. They will always be waiting for the sound of that bell tinkling over the forced open door. They will always be waiting for an excuse to pop up with ‘just the thing’.
And in the mean time they have strange heads full of VBUI’s. Vital bits of useless information. To anyone else.
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