One Word, One Thing

 

I watched an interview with a woman writer (no, not Alice Munro), who said that  that the ideas for  her novels start with a single word.  That's how she started writing her previous book, from a word that she made up, a neologism, and while she was writing it, a couple of words jumped out at her, she jotted them down, thus getting a start on her next novel.

Then, there was a photographer, who said in a recent interview that he photographs just one thing at a time.  That's all I caught from a page of a newspaper or magazine, promising  myself to come back to it, and as happens so often, lost the source and the memory of where I had seen it.

I on the other hand photograph three things at a time, believing that a photograph must contain three elements of interest, such as the photograph I snapped yesterday afternoon at a street fair.  It's not very good, but it should illustrate the point.

All this leads me via some twisted path to the short piece below which had its source in a single sentence I overheard somewhere in passing, just it and nothing else.

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"I don't spend time considering hypothetical situations!", I said, trying best to hide annoyance.  It's not going to happen, so why waste your brain bandwidth.  That river has long ago flowed to the sea. And I'm not standing on the bridge no more.  What if, what if, what if!   We'll deal with it when it comes about. Except that it won't.  But if it did, I think that I would say, no, thank you. Damn, it turns out I'm considering a hypothetical situation anyway.  "Let's go for ice cream at the new Italian place around the corner," I said getting up.