I'm not really eavesdropping ...

OK, I am. I'm out and about, and as I pass you, you say something like, "She told him he had ten minutes to get his stuff and get out", or "I don't know how to tell him how I feel", or "Listen, kid, nobody asked you to be born." I hear you and I wonder what the story is behind those words.

There is a cartoonist in Melbourne who eavesdrops and then draws a cartoon each week in the Sunday Age - Oslo Davis. Funnily enough, his cartoons make me laugh and wonder about people, but they very rarely make me want to write. Perhaps the drawing takes away the urge? Or maybe it's simply that what intrigues him doesn't intrigue me.

Nonetheless, I do listen. And I watch. Sometimes it's better not to hear what they are saying and rely on body language. I do this a lot. Hence the way my boss rolled his eyes once when I asked a question told me a heck of a lot more than his answer, or anything he's done since! I watch the way people sit - arms tightly crossed, heads shaking while they agree with someone, the smile that makes their face look like they are in pain.

I listen to people make promises, pretend they are brave, protest loudly while they twist and squirm in their chair, tell lies while their bodies say they are totally hiding something. I listen to tone. Those who are loud but are whining like small children saying "Not fair". Those who lay down the law but use words and a tone that show their fear. And the people whose smile really does light up a room just because they are genuinely good, happy people (not many of them these days).

I gather up story ideas from all kinds of places, but very often from things people tell me - or half-tell me. Snippets of memory, of family secrets, of something that deeply affected them. I gather them from stories in the newspaper, too - I once wrote a whole novel based on a sentence from an article about a New York murder. I wrote a whole verse novel based on a social psychology experiment I was told about - the end result bore no resemblance to the original story whatsoever. It didn't matter. The spark was what mattered, what got me thinking, creating characters, making a story, taking huge leaps and bounds with ideas to create something big and meaty.

I have a lot of family stories of my own. After many years of believing I had nothing to say about my own life, apart from in a few poems, I have started writing memoir pieces. One day perhaps my grandson will read them. For now, it's a way of keeping some family history and memories intact. So often the past is dismissed. How many tons of family records, letters, photos and mementos have been tossed in the trash by family members who don't care or think it's better all gone and buried? When you have a family where your parents and grandparents are all gone, suddenly you see how many stories have been lost.

So if you feel the urge to write your own stories, your family stories, or even just to try and preserve things in some way for future generations, do it. And if you write and you hear something that lodges in your brain and won't let go, that you keep on hearing like an echo - let it grow. It could be a novel.