On listening for things that aren't there

Most of my stories begin as a sound I can’t identify.

A tick in the walls of an old house. A pause on a phone line that goes on half a second too long. The particular hush of a paddock just before a storm, when even the insects stop to listen. I hear it, and something in me sits up, and I know that if I’m patient enough, if I wait long enough in that silence, a story will step out of it.

The waiting is the hard part. It is most of the work.

The discipline of nothing

People imagine that writing is about producing. Words on a page, a count at the end of the day. And it is, eventually. But for me the real work happens before that, in a kind of deliberate emptiness. I sit with the strange sound. I don’t try to explain it. I resist the urge to make it make sense too quickly.

Radio astronomers talk about integration time: the longer you point a dish at a patch of sky, the more faint signals rise above the noise. A source too weak to see in a minute becomes visible in an hour, unmistakable in a night.

Stories are like that. Given enough attention, the faintest of them resolve.

What I’m listening for

Not plot, at first. Not character. I’m listening for wrongness — the small, precise detail that doesn’t fit. A kettle left on a stove for nine years. A rest stop with no cars. A name that can be given away.

That detail is the signal. Everything else is just building the dish big enough to hear it.

The strange should arrive quietly, the way frost arrives.

So: sit still. Turn off the noise. Point yourself at the empty sky and wait. It’s not nothing out there. It never was.