Why?

Sometimes late at night or when I wake up in the morning a sentence or two unrelated to anything invades my brain. Often, it’s a line of dialogue with no context. Whatever it is, and from whatever recesses of my unconscious it arises, I then lay in bed for the longest time writing and re-writing it in my mind, experimenting with the words and their arrangement. I guess I do that because I’m a writer, and I wonder if other writers do the same.

This morning was one of the strangest ever. I (or some unidentified narrator or protagonist) said, “I once knew this guy whose name was William W. Whye, pronounced like way. The middle-name initial W was for another Whye, but this whye was pronounced why or like the letter Y, according to his mother, who should know since she gave him the name. She never said why she pronounce way why.”

I lay in bed for maybe ten or fifteen minutes playing with various ways of using whye and why and way in a sentence and thoughts of using William W. Whye’s name in a poem or a story until my thoughts devolved into something about Little Miss Muffet eating her curds and whey, and then I knew it was time to get up.