"HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY" : Steve Weddle

"Nothing Personal" Steve Weddle

I’d been consumed with this Alex Jackson novel. He hates guns, loves his mother, and has had a crush on a woman since they were in high school fifteen years before.

When a couple of guys with guns threaten Alex and his mom, Alex throws up on the guys. A hundred pages later, when Alex and a friend of his are running from another gun-toting bad guy, Alex gets shot in the butt and passes out. A hundred pages after that, Alex and the big bad guy face off, which doesn’t work out so well for Alex.

Fun times and all, but I had a real need for a thick porterhouse to balance out the steady diet of chicken salad.

And Oscar Martello was born.

On night, I was standing in the library of the Weddle cabin looking across the front yard, wondering about the movement I’d just seen. Probably nothing, of course, but I reached behind one of the top shelves – the one with Ted Kooser, Stephen Dunn, Anne Sexton, and Andrew Hudgins – and pulled out the knuckledusters. I stood at the window, lights out, holding a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and testing the weight of the knucks in the other.

I thought of smashing the glass and spreading the shards near the door so I could hear the person once they’d broken in. I thought of setting something up on one side of the hall to draw attention while I waited on the other side. Knee-level. Temple-level. Preparing for the assault.

I made some notes before I fell asleep and started sketching out the story in the morning.

One guy breaking into our home might be enough to cause me some trouble, but I needed a real tough guy. So I wrote the story of three guys breaking into the home of a bad-ass. And I needed to know why. And I wanted it to be a betrayal, maybe the breaking of a mentor-mentee relationship. Or maybe it could be the betrayal of a lover. So I had the mentee breaking into the mentor’s house. And then I played around with the lover’s betrayal. One saying the other had betrayed Oscar Martello.

I wanted Oscar to doubt the relationship with both, to wonder which one had turned on him. I wrote the story, leaving one at fault. Tough guy. Guns. Tight. Some nasty fighting. I sent it off to Plots With Gun. They turned it down without much hesitation, saying simply that it didn’t quite work.

Well, crap.

So I reworked it along with the beginning of another Oscar Martello story. I started to get a better feel for the character. I had an image of Luca Brasi, wanting to get out of the business of killing people. The break-in story, “Nothing Personal,” became more layered, more nuanced. A much better story than I’d sent to PWG.

I sent the revision off to fantastic Crimefactory and it appeared in their first rebooted issue, right around the time the second Oscar Martello story I’d written, “Missed Flight,” appeared at the amazing Beat To A Pulp.

What I haven’t mentioned is that all the while I’m playing with these stories, I’m sending parts and ideas to every friend who will return an email. Does this work? Is this too over-the-top? Can you picture this?

And I’m going back into the stories many times over.

Raymond Carver said that he wrote short stories instead of novels because he could get a story done in one sitting, maybe two, so it felt like a better accomplishment. He was always quick to add that he’d spent a long time revising those stories, adding and taking away.

How did I come to write Oscar Martello’s stories?

One night, the idea broke into my house. Then for months and months, I held the idea down and beat the holy hell out of it.