The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got Came From People I'll Never See Again
Writers are told constantly to 'write what you know,' and I've come to believe that's backwards. Write what you've overheard. Write what someone told you at a rest stop in Ohio when you were both waiting out the rain. The best material I've ever collected didn't come from books or workshops. It came from people whose names I never learned.
Here are ten of them.
1. The Waitress at the Waffle House, 2 a.m.
Somewhere on I-40 outside Memphis, she told me she'd worked the overnight shift for nineteen years because 'that's when people tell the truth.' She was right, and it taught me my first lesson: context is character. Who a person is at 2 a.m. is a truer character sketch than anything they'd tell you at a dinner party.
2. The Guy in the Hardware Store Line
He was buying forty dollars of sandpaper and, unprompted, explained that his late father never let him use power tools. 'He said you learn the wood by feeling it fight back.' I've never written about woodworking. But I've written about fathers, inheritance, and doing things the hard way a dozen times since.
Lesson: a specific detail is a skeleton key. Sandpaper opens doors that 'grief' cannot.
3. The Woman on the Delayed Flight to Denver
Six hours on the tarmac and she told me she was flying to meet her biological mother for the first time, at age fifty-one. She'd rehearsed what to say and was terrified it would all go wrong. It's the only one of these conversations where I said almost nothing — and that's the lesson. When someone hands you their story, hold it. Don't trade yours for it.
4. The Retired Bridge Inspector at a Kentucky Truck Stop
He inspected suspension bridges for thirty years and said the scariest thing he ever found was a crack so small 'you'd swear I was lying to get attention.' He was right to worry, he added, because nobody believed him until the closure. That's a thriller plot, sure. But it's also a lesson in stakes: the most terrifying things are the ones that are easy to dismiss.
5. The Teenager at the Rest Stop in New Mexico
He was photographing every single vending machine on Route 66. When I asked why, he said, 'They're all a little different and nobody notices.' I think about that kid every time I'm tempted to write the obvious version of a scene. The detail nobody notices is the one worth noticing.
6. The Barber Who Talked Me Out of a Haircut
I wanted something drastic. He looked at me in the mirror and said, 'You don't want a haircut, you want a different week.' I got the regular cut. I've used that line — or versions of it — to diagnose characters who think they want one thing and actually need another.
7. The Man Who Sat Down at My Diner Counter and Ordered 'Whatever He's Having'
I got a second meatloaf I didn't want and a twenty-minute conversation about how he'd eaten at this exact counter every Friday for eleven years since his wife passed. Not a complaint — a ritual. It taught me that love in fiction is better shown as routine than as statement. Nobody in real life says 'I miss her.' They order an extra meatloaf.
8. The Woman Walking Her Dog in a Portland Drizzle
She stopped to let me pet her dog and mentioned the dog was her late husband's, and that she'd walked this route every day since and 'the dog doesn't know, and that's the part that gets me.' I didn't write that down until that night, and I've never used it directly. But every grief scene I've written since has been tested against it. If the emotion wouldn't survive contact with a real sentence, rewrite it.
9. The Air Marshal Who Wasn't One (Probably)
A guy on a red-eye explained, very casually, that he flew 'cargo protection' — which is either exactly what it sounds like or the most elaborate cover story I've ever heard. Either way: when someone gives you an unreliable narrator in the wild, take notes. Mystery is a gift. Don't resolve it.
10. My Neighbor, Three Weeks After I Moved In
He walked over with a casserole and the following sentence: 'I'm not going to pretend we'll be close, but if your pipes ever burst, I own a wet vac.' Twenty years later, we've never needed the wet vac, but he's the first person I'd call for anything. That's the last lesson: the best dialogue isn't clever — it's honest about what people actually say when they're offering something.
The Point of All This
None of these people know they're in my head. That's the deal with strangers — you get their truth for free and they get nothing, which is why it's on you to make it worth something. Every one of these conversations cost me nothing but the willingness to stop scrolling and pay attention to the person in front of me.
Good material isn't hiding in a retreat or a residency. It's in the hardware store line, standing behind a man holding forty dollars of sandpaper. You just have to be quiet long enough to hear it.
