Writers are a strange lot. Well... a certain percentage are! The human being you are born as can be a 'nice, dull, everyday’ person. The kind that gets up, has a bath, goes to work, eats breakfast with the children, has a car, a mortgage... and behind this facade is the unseen voice, unseen observer who takes the high vantage point viewing life for its stories. Scavenging for stories, looking out for stories, digging through the everyday rubble for writing material. Writers understand they can have schizophrenic tendencies, but living with it is harder. For example, you are living a perfectly normal day, then wham! An incident occurs, which draws out the observer/writer in you. He turns around the facts the way he wants to, he is manipulative and, unleashed on paper, he is uncontrollable. Especially cartoonists, comedy writers, satirists... They are powerless when the transformation begins. Alongside the normal human husband, father and friend is the writer watching the world and waiting to transform it. Two entities housed in the same body.

A writer is always on the lookout for physical behaviour, characteristics, psychological motives, probing, probing and probing. At times, sitting at a party you catch the eye of an old friend and thoughts runaway with you. Why was he avoiding your eye? What happened to his wife? Is he looking down and out? The writer eases into his reveries.

Like the old lady in the house down my lane, keeps to herself, lives alone on the first floor and walks out everyday at 8 pm to the local restaurant open nearby to buy her dinner. I was told she does this at 1 pm and 8 pm everyday come summer or winter. Strange, because her son lives on the ground floor but is almost never in town. There is an old Labrador dog tied at the gate where the watchman sits and she talks to him on her way out and in. The watchman avoids her eye but the dog is her faithful listener. Now, this sets my mind ticking....

The other day, it was a lovely sunny day in the middle of winter and just the time to sit in the park outside. To hear the birds converse and the sun settle mildly on your back. I sat on the park bench and then noticed across me, a couple chatting. Suddenly she dropped her head in her hands and kept shaking, maybe sobbing, I could not tell. I wondered were they lovers. Was the affair coming to an end, were they married and just taking the fight away from the family at home... Stop it! I told myself leave them to live their lives in privacy! Leave the world alone.

The worst is when you turn inwards and dissect your world unmercifully. You can see the words on a page echoing real life encounters. Are there no secrets that can be kept from the writer within you? That’s when the watcher in you watches and the writer in you writes and sometimes the transformation is seamless. The selves fuse and a story is born, novel to the world outside and so real to the writer himself.

Perhaps, that is why writers are such good listeners. Be careful who you speak to next…

(The writer is a theatre director and novelist)