Hi Everyone,
I recently heard someone use the expression ‘information from nowhere.’ What she seemed to be saying was that sometimes (and this was, she felt, her particular quirk) information about a person, place or thing would arrive uninvited, apropos of no event and relatively free-floating. From that single sliver of info she would invent an entire thriller, so to speak. For example, her young adult daughter went off the radar for a week or two, and out of nowhere she knew she was embroiled in a relationship with an older (married, drug-addicted) man. How? Information from nowhere.
To my knowledge, most fiction writers share the same information-from-nowhere trait. But not always; I know plenty that might as well be writing non-fiction. They pick up a story idea from The Times, the BBC, any news outlet really, and they follow that thread; change the hair, names, locale, and voilà – a novel in hand. That might be creative non-fiction? The lines seem so blurred today. But what it is not is information from nowhere. Information from nowhere is exactly what it says it is: evidence from nothing.
For an artist, author, writer, I think information from nowhere is often helpful, even a bit of a spark, a fire striker, to get the inspirational juices flowing. But where information from nowhere has landed me in a heap of trouble, or at least in a misguided direction, is in the ‘real world.’ It’s hard to think of an example, because they usually involve a great deal of backtracking (or sweeping things quickly under the rug) with no one being made any the wiser. However, one example might be when I make an assumption based on these rickety ‘facts’—something my helpful father warned me about from his infallible military training, with the word ASSUME: When you assume, you make an Ass out of You and Me. (KISS. Keep it Simple Stupid was another.)
Happily, maybe sadly, I missed the import of his drilled-in expertise, and still found information from nowhere sparkling like a diamond, a vein of gold, a fun portal that took me from one adventure to the next. As a young kid, I found the experience hypnotic, and certainly a step up from the drag, gong and bash of TV. It was not dissimilar to reading. Count me in. Now back to the real world. In reality information from nothing does not work: strictly hypothetically, an example might be that finding a bizarre (cheaply published) book about other worlds on the floor of my son’s room in the jumble he has brought home from uni does not in fact mean he has joined an extreme cult.
However, that is my information from nowhere. Here’s how it works: I pick up the book, horrified that it is inscribed on the half-title page with some sharpened flourish of a name that includes what appears to be a creepy symbol, some arcane insignia, some mention of never before discovered, veiled, dark worlds. I Google ‘cult.’ I check the publisher. All the trademark signs of grim, gruesome, awful and unlawful. Clearly, my darling boy will have to be deprogrammed.
Knowing the hazards of information from nowhere, I pause—24 hours, 48, a week—with that spine-chilling book calling to me, just the tip of an iceberg, waiting to be brought to task for hijacking my son, but then before I can do or say anything, as he is packing for his new digs, my son motions to the heap on the floor, where I have left THE book. “Mum,” he says, “that can all go to recycling. I don’t know what it is, or where it came from.”
Information from nowhere? In real life? Best to have your doubts! So here’s wishing you a November that’s well grounded, humming with equipoise, grounded in fact; unless, of course, you’ve got that imaginary world brewing, a novel, a play, a song, a filmscript on the boil.
Love,
Marlene
Photo by Midjourney