The stray dog dreams of home
Writers write about what they know. It's a mantra repeated so many times it's downright cliché. But it's there for a reason. It's also incredibly misinterpreted. In college writing classes, writers took this to mean "write biographical events." Problem is for 90% of us, very little happens of note in the first twenty-odd years of our lives that is unique enough to tell in story form.
Even the milestone events like moving, divorce or losing a family member or ones that others have experienced. What I think "writers write about what they know," really means, is that good writers can take what they know and translate it into a way that is fresh.
There's also a second part to that, which is extremely important in all forms of writing. I have found it to be true both in my professional career in advertising, as well as my professional career in fiction. And that is this– if writers write about what they know, then they have to know a lot. They need to research, to be sure. But they also need to have experiences, and those experiences must be unique. They need to meet people they otherwise wouldn't meet, go places that aren't on their map and do things that aren't on their to-do list.
For the past two weeks I've been traveling around Chile for work, filming some commercials in locations that are as remote as they are breathtaking. I am fortunate that the agency is paying for the trip as I would probably not have been here otherwise. Chile was never on my to-see list. But since I've been here, every waking moment has been special. The work moments have been special because of the director who is amazingly talented and generous with collaborations. And what little down time I've had has been special, too. Not just because of the aforementioned locales. I've managed to observe and get to know some people who are so interesting, they will surely find their way into a story if not indirectly influence a protagonist.
That last part is key. As with life-experiences before you're finished with education, post-educational life experiences need to be just as interesting in order to make up the basis of a character or story. If you recreated Hemingway's life, you'd be walking in someone else's shoes. The same is true with travel. If you only see the expected sights, visit the tourist traps and stick to expat neighborhoods, there's a good chance your experience will be the same as everyone else's. And what's the point in that?
At the risk of belaboring a point I am by no means suggesting every day must be lived to the brink of extinction; that lifestyle is neither realistic nor healthy. I could make the argument it burnt Kerouac out after one great novel.
What I'm really talking about are the smaller moments. The ones others disregard if they even see them. These moments don't make for instagrammable posts.* What they have the potential to make though, is a great story.
Since I've been down here, I've encountered some quiet moments that are worth keeping. Hopefully when this project is over and I take time off, I'll be able to coax them out and form them fully and turn them into something of substance. Unfortunately there are miles to go before this will happen. On the bright side, it hopefully means there is still time for a few more new moments to occur.
*One of my favorite Instagram accounts right now is @Insta_Repeat because it shows just how much we unknowingly copy ourselves. No doubt some of the photos above are similarly repeated.
With the exception of the dog with the pear. What I learned since being here is there are a million stray dogs in Chile, and half a million alone in Santiago. They are all very friendly as they rely on the kindness of strangers to feed them. Some, like the one above, have been spayed or neutered and collared. On our last shoot day, he stayed with us the entire time. Sure people fed him, and I gave him tons of water because it's hot and dry and dusty all the time here. He was flea-ridden. He had a cataract in one eye. But his tail wagged constantly.
The pear was his ball. Crew members would take turns throwing it, and he'd retrieve it. Either he once had a home and was trained and then abandoned, or somehow managed to learn a few tricks while living on the street.
There are kennels to give them shelter, medical attention and so forth. And if you happen to live in an apartment that doesn't allow dogs, you can pay them a small fee to go hang out there and be around them for the day.
I've never been a dog person. But spending the day with this dog made me turn a corner. I'm glad he's taken care of, relatively speaking, but I wish I could have cleaned him up and taken him home. While we shot our spot, he lay at our feet on the artificial grass underneath a tent, dozing in the mid-day heat. He seemed so content. I imagined him dreaming that this was his every day life. Surrounded by people who would love him, pet him, play with him give him shelter from the cold and heat. I hated to watch him leave when we packed up.
Our driver noticed my reaction. I told him it must be hard on the dog to only have a brief moment of companionship before it has to return to the streets. His observation was that it's equally as hard the other way around. At least in Santiago, every dog is taken care of by the residents. They have tons of love and in return, the dog provides a brief moment of companionship to each individual who is then left with the same feeling I have.
Knowing from my research that there is only one public dog shelter in Santiago (stared in 2009) and that it was only in 2017 that Chile passed a law creating a registry for animal owners and obligating them to take the responsibility of caring for a dog seriously, (which would explain the amount living on the streets if they hadn't been doing so the whole time), it's hard to buy into this rose-colored version. But it does make for a good story.