by Elizabeth Fedorko

In the Movie Tootsie, Terri Garr plays a struggling actress who stalks out of a soap opera audition, takes off a pair of red-rimmed glasses, and tells Dustin Hoffman’s character that she keeps buying stuff, yet she gets nowhere in her acting career. In my opinion, she has the wrong stuff.

Do you have stuff? More than King Tut’s tomb or the shoe closet of Imelda Marcos? Does the guilt-monkey ride your back when you are not writing, but buying stuff? Tell that chimp to take one long monkey hike. I believe that stuff, and the act of getting stuff is good for a writer, this one anyway.

Think about it while I tell you about my stuff. Is there a certain type of pen and paper that allows you to express your story ideas better that others? I like the Bic Velocity ball point click and thrift shop sewn spine notebooks with floppy covers. I write like crazy in them and take them everywhere. I feel, well, “writerly” when I use them. You may have an Alphasmart and write at supersonic speed. One day I’ll join the twenty-first century. But not today.

When I sit down at my desk in my holey, buttonless, blue cotton cardigan I almost feel like Grace Metalious or Ayn Rand. When I was twelve, I saw a photo of Metalious on the back of her blockbuster Peyton Place. She wore jeans and stared at her typewriter as if it held every mystery that perplexes mankind. At that time I decided being a writer was very cool, and I wanted to live like That Girl in my own Manhattan apartment and have a neat-o boyfriend like Donald Holinger or Bobby Sherman. I grew up to have a neat-o husband who looks a little like Paul Reiser and I live in a house in the DC burbs—I’m a lucky girl, even if I’m not that girl.

As for other writer’s stuff, if it were not for the immediacy and the spell check feature of computers, I might compose on the same Olivetti I had in grade school. There’s something lulling and creative-enhancing about the tappity tap of a manual typewriter rather than the “toc toc” of my IBM laptop keys. But I wouldn’t trade my laptop for anything. It’s probably the first computer to have crawled from technology’s primordial ooze, but it fits me like a well-worn shoe.

I asked WRW’s charming VP about her stuff, and she confessed that a mini Slinky sits on her desk most of the time. When her brain needs a rest her fingers do the walking with the coiled metal. We also discussed the need to, from time to time, get up from the desk and walk around and let the circulation flow back to our butts. Sometimes we walk right to our cars and head for the local bookstore, or even better, a rare books sale. In the DC area book sales abound, especially in the fall. I have stood in line with the “book nerds” an hour or so before the huge Goodwill sale begins, which, I guess, makes me a book nerd too. When the doors open—Watch Out! I have lots of out-of-print books bought at bargain prices from those sales. You are welcome to join me in the stampede—seriously. It’s great fun, and I feel no guilt that I’m not home working because I know I’m finding great resource material. Good stuff! No guilt! 

Is there any time you should be guilty about not writing? That is purely up to you. If you set up personal writing goals, try to keep them. Sometimes life (recent tragic events not withstanding) can get stuck between you and the storytelling. You are, after all, human. If you think of writing as a sanctuary, you will always want to go there.

But back to the stuff. I bet all of you have good stuff in your writing spaces. I may not want your stuff, nor would you want mine, believe me, you don’t! Yet, it’s all about nesting isn’t it? Don’t we feel secure in our own space, surrounded by familiar, comfortable, and even helpful things? If you need stuff, go get some and come back to your story, a few dollars poorer, but with a refreshed mind. I know if I’m browsing the Romance section of any bookstore, I get all antsy to get back home and pound out the pages.

If the term “stuff” is too pedestrian for you, consider that you have “accoutrements”. They may say a lot about you or your characters. If you came to my house and saw three different colors of ketchup: red, green, and purple (yes, purple), you would say I have a fairly spoiled, but greatly loved, child. You would be right, but wouldn’t it be more interesting to think I was an artist who uses condiments for pigments? Your stuff can work for you and your writing. Use them as creative jumping off points.

Now, please excuse me while I go have some of the stuff that fuels my writing: a Diet Coke Big Gulp and a turkey hot dog with onions, mustard, and purple ketchup.

~~~~~
Elizabeth “Beth” Fedorko is a full time wife, mother and writer. She dreams of being the first romance writer on “Survivor.”