The Walter Mitty Method of Writing

In 1939, The New Yorker published James Thurber’s wonderful short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” If you’ve read it, you the better for it. If you haven’t, shame on you. The story opens with a bang:

“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!”…

“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”

“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence…

Walter Mitty is daydreaming, tooling along in his car. Escaping his life of routine and habit in bite-sized packets. Until his wife snatches him back to reality.

Now I’d like to think I’m a reasonably mature adult, living in the here and now, consumed with the grownup concerns of mortgages and lawn maintenance and diminishing cubicle space, my eyes steely, my jaw set in a determined fashion. But I know better and all evidence points to the contrary. At my age, I’ve given up aspirations of ever achieving such an exalted plateau of maturity.

Fortunately, Thurber and Mitty devised a valuable lesson for myself and other writers.

I frequently concoct little episodes in my head, spinning snippets of story from the mundane experiences of life. I’m stuck in an overlong meeting, and the talk prattles on about scheduling an event on Outlook. I’m thinking, hmm, a hacker spy squad penetrates Outlook and infects it with a virus that causes a banking panic in Hong Kong, provoking the Chinese into mobilize a carrier task force, because the hack makes it appear that the panic was intentionally triggered by the United States during an Outlook-scheduled meeting of powerbrokers, and…

The meetings in my head are typically more interesting than the ones I attend.

I’m sitting in traffic, drumming on the steering wheel. The car in front of me is tiny, a Euro sports car. Almost no trunk space. Not big enough to stash a body. Big enough for a bowling ball bag, though. And the bag doesn’t have a ball in it, but a head. Yeah. A head bag. That’s the ticket.

I’m digging weeds in the yard and I strike something hard. I dig more and find that the object is not a piece of concrete rubble, but something big. I scrape the dirt away and discover the graven stone image of a woman’s face, vaguely Egyptian, clearly royal. Its eyes stare blankly into mine. What’s Cleopatra’s sarcophagus doing in my backyard in Maitland? Was the previous owner of my house on the run from an international cabal of art thieves? Or did Queen Cleopatra fake her own suicide-by-asp to throw Octavian and his scheming cohorts off, sail across the Atlantic in 30 BC in a Thor Heyerdahl Ra II-type raft of papyrus reeds, and ordain her royal tomb in what twenty centuries later would be my yard? And why am I wasting time digging weeds when this mystery is screaming to be resolved? My fans, all six of them, deserve better!

I know enough about my writer friends to know that I’m not alone in my secret Walter Mitty episodes and adventures. So go ahead; get in touch with your inner Mitty. Embrace the cacophony of voices in your head. Listen to them. Pluck the better ones, bring them to life, and share them with the world. Maybe we’re crazy, but our special brand of crazy deserves an audience.

Here’s a link to Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Enjoy!