HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: SANDRA SEAMANS

"HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: Sandra Seamans

A while back Patti asked me if I’d like to contribute a piece to her series, “How I Came to Write This Story." I hesitated, mostly because it’s hard to explain how a story comes to be. The truth is, no two stories evolve in the same way, even from the same author. Every story has it’s own pattern. But Patti persisted and here I am staring at a blank page wondering what to say.

The story I chose to write about is “In God’s Own Time” published over at A Twist of Noir” last year ( http://a-twist-of-noir.blogspot.com/2010/09/twist-of-noir-583-sandra-seamans.html ) and one of my favorites from the last few years. It all started with this bit of dialogue that popped into my head one night.

“You know, I was seventeen and pregnant the afternoon my daddy died. I put a shotgun to his head and blew his brains all over the Lazy Boy. Hell of a mess that was. I was told they had to toss that old chair out in the trash cause there just wasn’t no cleaning the blood and brains out of the fabric. Pity, it was a nice chair.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with it but a post by Charles Gramlich on his Razored Zen blog felt like he’d tossed a glove down in front of my keyboard. Charles said he didn’t care for stories that started with dialogue and here I had this great opening for a story that was all dialogue.

Oh, I wrestled with several ideas, but nothing seemed to work because the character I was trying to write, I didn’t even like. I set the story aside until Spinetingler hosted a contest that wanted revenge stories, and even then I didn’t consider this story. I dug out an old story about a man getting out of prison and seeking revenge on the step-mother who put him there.

Of course, at the time, Dave Zeltserman had a series of men out of prison novels that everyone was talking about. I figured anything I wrote would never be as good as what he’d done, I’d just be treading plowed ground. Then I wondered what if it was a woman who got out of prison?

I pulled out that snippet of dialogue I’d written and changed the “I put a shotgun” to “somebody put a shotgun” and I had a woman who was looking for the person who killed her Daddy.

Then the questions began. Who’s she talking to? I stuck her in a pickup with a kid who knew her history but not who she was. I knew she was heading home but I wondered what happened to her baby? Who had framed her and why? And slowly the story unfolded. It went way too long for the contest, but I didn’t care. I was enjoying the journey this woman was taking to retrieve the twenty years she’d lost. What I loved most was it didn’t turn into the usual story of revenge at gunpoint. It became the story of a twisted obsession and the pressure of gossip in a small town.

You can find Sandra most days over at her blog, MY LITTLE CORNER. Her terrific stories are everywhere.