QUIET PLEASE, WOMAN AT WORK

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Silence. It’s hard to come by in a wired world. We’ve all seen the people in their cars talking on their cell phones. Or the people with a Blue Tooth stuck in their ear walking around looking as if they’re talking to the air. Recently I saw a man standing outside our little post office stomping his feet in frustration and yelling incomprehensibly. I made a wide swath around him, thinking he was another suburban casualty off his meds, when I realized he was angrily talking to someone on his Blue Tooth. Why Tooth? Why Blue? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. I see young mothers pushing their babies in their prams while talking on cell phones. Do the babies know they’re not talking to them? Do their mother’s voices become white noise to them? What if the baby wants to burble out a new found word? How will the mother hear this newly formed gem if she’s constantly on her cell?

I took a walk the other day and saw a man leaning against a horse. The horse had a big finely carved Western saddle on it. The man’s back was to me. I wondered where he rode his horse. (We’re more countrified than country.) So I thought I would ask him. I walked around the horse and discovered the man was on his cell phone. Before I could open my mouth he pressed his forefinger against his lips and schussed me! It was as if I had entered his office without knocking. We were outside under a big blue sky. Spring flowers were popping up all around us in a narcissistic dizzy. And this man is telling me to be quiet while he is chatting away? The horse looked down his long face at me and curled his floppy lips displaying big yellow teeth. Not a Blue Tooth is his mouth.

These incidents got me to thinking about writing. To write you have to be emotionally connected to your subject, characters and story. To write you have to be disconnected from the noise and chattering minutia of life. You have to put your cell phone down. (I’m reminded of a PBS children’s song with the line, “If you want to play the saxophone, you have to put your rubber ducky down.”) To write you have to pull yourself away from the internet. You have to turn off the blathering TV and the radio. A writer must learn how to sit in silence. The only noise the clattering of the keys on your board. And maybe the sound of the heater going on and off. And in my case, the dog snoring. A writer needs quiet. A writer needs to stop talking and hear what’s going on inside her head. A writer needs to hear what her imagination is telling her. To allow her unconscious to bubble up into reality.

In this wired age, it’s the silence that is more daunting than the empty page for new writers. Or maybe I should say the weight of stillness mixed with the fear of nothingness is more frightening. New writers write too quickly. I think they want to get back to being connected. But of course they’re not connected. They’re only taking their minds off the silence. I use this avoidance as a form of characterization with my character, Diana Poole. She fears the quietness to such an extent that she has a TV on at all times. (Oh, I sold another Diana Poole short story to EQMM titled, “What’s It Worth?”)

Now, I’m not saying that writers can’t write when it’s noisy. I think all of us have experienced writing in coffee shops, on airplanes, sitting in hotel lobbies. Yes, writers can write most anywhere. When my husband was producing records I would sit in the studio and write. The rock n’ roll music was so loud that it enveloped me, tuning out other distractions. Now when I write I’m only able to listen to is Willie Nelson singing Stardust and other standards.

As the writer needs to fill the empty page, the writer needs silence. Stillness. Listen to it. You can almost hear it.