“When I’m working on a novel, everything is material”, says my friend, the writer Christina Baker Kline.  Christina, author is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be.  She is co-editor, with Anne Burt, of About Face: Women Write about What They See When They Look in the Mirror and co-author, with Christina L. Baker, of The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk about Living Feminism.  She has edited two other anthologies: Child of Mine and Room to Grow.  She is Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University; her blog is A Writing Life: Notes on Craft and the Creative Process.  She generously offered to guest blog, and here is her post:

It’s Back-to-School night, an annual ritual I must repeat three times this year in three different schools.  (Bad planning, those birth dates.) High school, middle school, elementary, it’s all the same: green-tinted fluorescents buzzing faintly overhead, the slight whiff of disinfectant, at least one nervous teacher with a fistful of bullet points, several dozing parents.

Yet despite the surface sameness, each endless evening is endless in its own way.  So I look around, and I pull out my writing pad.  I note a bead of sweat on the new vice-principal’s brow.  The inspirational bromides of the athletic director (and the whistle he wears around his neck, even in front of parents at 8 pm).  The Julia Child-like guffaw of a frizzy haired bio teacher.  (Did I just glimpse a flirtatious glance between the band leader and the pianist?  Maybe not. But his wife is watching him like a hawk.)

And then there are the parents. Tired and bedraggled, restless and impatient, alert and engaged. Some, like me, are taking notes. (Other writers? No, probably just better parents than I’ll ever be, legitimately interested in keeping A days and B days straight.)  Directly in front of me, a group of women wearing running shoes and windbreakers, all with similar gray-streaked layered haircuts, cluster together; across the room, a tall blonde in a low-cut purple dress bites her frosted lower lip; half a dozen dads in suits surreptitiously check their iPhones and Blackberries. Stay-at-home moms in tennis bracelets (and some in tennis whites) contrast with working moms in tailored dresses carrying stylish totes.  Latecomers of all stripes stand wearily against the back wall.
Time flies, and before I know it I’m back in the parking lot with a page full of characters and an idea for a scene.  See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?