Seven Strangers Who Accidentally Co-Wrote My Stuff

Writers steal. Not wallets — material. And the best material almost never comes from other books. It comes from strangers, the ones who talk to you for ninety seconds and hand you a whole character, free of charge.

Here are seven of mine. If any of you are reading this: thank you, and sorry.

1. The Waitress Who Refilled Everything

A truck stop outside Zanesville, Ohio. My coffee never got below half-full because a waitress in her sixties moved like she had a radar for it. When I complimented her, she said, "Honey, I've been reading tables for thirty years. You're a two-cups-before-he-asks kind of man."

She became the entire backbone of a short story about a diner in a dying town — the one person who notices everybody. I changed her name. I did not change the line about reading tables. Some things you don't touch.

2. The Flight Seatmate Who Missed a Funeral

A delayed flight out of Denver, three hours on the tarmac. The man beside me, maybe fifty, told me unprompted that he was missing his brother's funeral because of this delay, and that he'd already missed the wedding, and "at some point you stop being the guy who shows up late and start being the guy who doesn't show up."

I wrote nothing for two years. Then that line walked into an essay about regret like it owned the place. I hope he made it to something on time eventually. I doubt it.

3. The Hardware Store Regular

I was in a hardware store in Missouri trying to buy the right kind of anchor bolts and clearly failing, when a regular — flannel, coffee, the works — leaned over and said, "Whatever you're building, buy one more than you think you need. Everybody always needs one more."

That's now a running philosophy in a novel draft I keep threatening to finish. A minor character says a version of it in chapter four. It's the most quoted thing in the manuscript. A hardware stranger built that.

4. The Kid at the Laundromat

A laundromat in Albuquerque, 11 p.m. A kid, maybe ten, watching his clothes spin and asked me, dead serious, "Do you think the machines know what's in them, or just how heavy it is?"

I have thought about that question more times than I've thought about most things people have said to me on purpose. It became the opening line of a piece about how much we can ever know about what we're carrying.

5. The Woman Who Watered Plants for a Living

On an Amtrak somewhere around Harrisburg, a woman told me she'd watered the plants in empty offices for twenty-two years and had never once met the people whose ferns she kept alive. "I know their plants better than their coworkers do," she said.

She turned into a whole character in a story about invisible labor — the people maintaining lives they'll never be thanked by. I gave her a better ending than real life probably gave her.

6. The Man Who Returned a Shopping Cart

A grocery store parking lot in Georgia, pouring rain. A man in his eighties returned his cart to the corral, all the way, in the downpour, when every other person had abandoned theirs mid-lot. When I mentioned it, he shrugged: "The rule doesn't stop mattering just because it's raining."

I've written that man three times now, under three names. He's become my personal test for what integrity looks like on the page — small, unglamorous, and slightly damp.

7. The Toll Booth Voice

Years ago, a toll collector on the Kansas Turnpike looked at my out-of-state plates and said, "Long way from wherever you're from. Whatever you're driving toward, hope it's worth the toll." I gave him two dollars and forty cents and he gave me a thesis statement.

That line titles a travel essay I still get notes about. Readers assume I invented it. I did not. I just happened to be the car in front of the window that day.

The Point of All This

Every one of these people was a stranger for less than an hour. None of them were trying to be interesting. That's the trick, I think — the moments that end up in the work almost never announce themselves. They're just people being honest in passing, and the only required skill on my end was to shut up, listen, and write it down before it faded.

Keep your ears on. Somebody's co-writing your next piece right now and doesn't know it.