THE WRITING PROCESS

I was always both entranced and mystified by stories. I can remember, when I was five or six, visiting great-grandfather in the nursing home to which great-grandmother, who’d had it up to here, had exiled him. He was half-reclining in a window seat wrapped to the neck in at least three plaid blankets because this was winter on the south coast of Maine and the nursing home wasn’t lavish with the forced air. He was telling me a story that featured a crowd of retainers watching the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots. He got in all the gory details – the falling ax, the spurting blood, the severed head rolling down the steps. I have no idea why, for Heaven’s sake, he thought the story appropriate for a six-year-old.  But I do remember thinking there was something magical going on here.

How did great-grandfather know where to start? How did he know what happened next? How did he know when he had come to the end? How did he know who the people were in the story?

It was all mystifying. (I was six years old.)

Some years after those sessions with great-grandfather, while I was dropping in and out of college, attempting to play the banjo and hoping to get a junked bug-eye Sprite running again, I was trying to write short stories. Many involved a character named Annie who lived with the first-person narrator. “That year they lived in a house by the river. The river flowed down from the mountain. The mountain was blue in the haze. The stones in the river were white, the water was cold, my sandwiches were good, etc., etc.” Yes, in those days Papa was still The Man, but my stories were so bad they weren’t even bad Hemingway. They were bad bad Hemingway. Anyway, eventually, I went into newspaper work – imitating Papa again, but also as a way to write and get paid for it. That led to a career covering organized crime, blithering politicians, government corruption and so forth. (Covering mobsters was especially fun: yes, they really do talk like that. And politicians? Way back, I was covering our local congressman and the large contributions he was getting from banks. Congressman, I asked him, what about this contribution from blah blah blah? He scowled back at me and said, Why, that’s peanuts. They couldn’t buy me for that! Can’t make this stuff up, as they say.)

For my next career I segued seamlessly into the role of private detective and fraud investigator. (Being an investigator is basically the same as being a reporter – you find out things and then write them up, in this case for your client.) Investigating was a ton of fun too. I mean, what’s not to enjoy about getting the goods on some scammer who’s knocking down $10,000 a month tax-free by faking injury or disability. And then getting to write up his prosecution referral! And, of course, there are side benefits like getting to carry a gun and having a license to flip at people while a cigarette dangles from your lip (in those days we were allowed to smoke) and occasionally being scared to death, which gets the adrenaline pumping marvelously.

And then for my third career, I decided I’d better start making some real money so I took a position with a PR firm that specialized in handling crisis situations. What this meant was that if you got arrested or sued or otherwise found yourself in a dicey situation, we’d handle the media in complement to your lawyer’s handling of the legal stuff. In practical terms, this meant almost all of our clients were corporations or wealthy individuals because they were the only ones who could afford our outlandish rates. Mostly what we did was write strategy plans and statements to be delivered by the accused and pitches to try to get reporters interested in favorable stories about our clients. A lot of the work was pretty boring, although it did have its moments: getting a good zinger into a story or coming up with a really devilish strategy. On the other hand, I also thought many of the firm’s clients actually deserved the trouble they were facing, which made my eventual exit inevitable.

And so, finally, I come to my fourth and, I fervently hope, last career: writing fiction again, like I wanted to do all those many years ago. Taking that long detour really pissed me off for a while. One day, feeling down, I told my wife how angry I was, in retrospect, at taking that swerve into newspaper work and the subsequent careers. It was my own fault, I told her, but just think where I’d be today if I’d just kept at the fiction writing back then! Forty more years of learning my craft! What a dummy I was!

It was only later, thinking about what I’d complained of in my fit of pique, that I came to an interesting realization. Although it was, in many ways, inadvertent, even in some ways accidental, maybe I wasn’t such a dummy after all! Because (and maybe you tumbled to this long before I did) each milepost on that long detour did manage to teach me something about storytelling: How to write logically, with the inessential pruned away; how to discern and then use the details that make a report (or a story) come alive; how to marshal an argument, which is the backbone of any narrative.

But beyond these lessons, and in my opinion more important, are the experiences I compiled during my detour from fiction writing. I now know how it feels to have an otherwise mild-manner husband confess to me that he butchered his wife and if he hadn’t been caught would have gone after everybody else who’d ever said a bad word about him. I know what it’s like to watch rescue workers pick up body parts leftover from a plane crash. I’ve listened to all the self-justifying blather of venal politicians and corrupt officials. I’ve dodged and weaved through the nonsense spewed by entitled rich people who think they should be excused their sins because… well, because they’re rich. I’ve met dope dealers, gun runners and people smugglers, and the cops and government agents chasing them. I’ve interviewed mothers who just lost their children. I’ve lived on the street with a couple homeless guys. I’ve…

I could go on, but I won’t. (There were also, by the way, a lot of relatively normal people on the list.)

So, in my 60s now, I’m living in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania with my wife Rosetta and our canine pal Casey. And at last I’m writing fulltime and have managed to publish short stories in a number of literary magazines, and I’ve got a novel in the can which I think is pretty good but which the agents (screw ‘em!) don’t and another novel underway. I’m also working on a novella featuring miniature android dogs and a family on the run from Los Hombres Derecho that I hope will kick off a short story collection.

But the process of storytelling still remains mysterious to me, just as it did to my 6-year-old self listening to great-grandfather in the nursing home. How did he know where to start? How did he know what happened next? How did he know when he had come to the end? How did he know who the people were in the story?

An image will come to me, generally a person in a particular place. I’ll have no idea who this person is or where this place is located. But a sentence will form and I’ll write that sentence down and then sometimes, if the magic is working, other sentences will arrive: the person, now a character, will begin to take on flesh and will do something, and the place will start to become a setting, and another action will follow the first and details will begin to infiltrate the setting and it will all proceed from there until eventually a story is told.

Or, if the story gods have decided not to favor me at the moment, it will just lie there, that first sentence, just lie there and die there and turn into just so much detritus.

I have no idea why. I might as well be that 6-year-old again.