HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: Jim Wilsky

How I Came To Write This Story: Big Cat

by Jim Wilsky

When I was asked by Patti to write this installment for her series, I was of course very appreciative and honored to do so. At the same time, I was of course, clueless. I’m positive I had the deer in the headlights look going on as I typed my response back to her and enthusiastically said, “Absolutely!” I have always feared explaining myself or making some sort of sense of why and what I write. Not so much fear I suppose as it is maybe just the difficulty in trying to explain a black hole in space or outline why it gets so quiet right before a big storm. Many times I just don’t know why I would chose to write a story like Big Cat, at Beat to a Pulp.

The only common denominators for a starting point I can consistently point to is place and memory. More times than not, the setting is absolutely crucial to me. Frequently its just as important as the nutshell of a story or the characters in it. If I know a place well or there’s a place I’ve been, or even a place I haven’t been but find intriguing - that seems to be a trigger for me and I’ll build a story on that foundation. As I’m sure all writers do at varying degrees, I also pull from memory. Memory of those places, people you’ve known or events that seem to have been imprinted in your mind.

Big Cat was not the agonizing dentist appointment that some stories are for me. It came easy and that really is a conversation in itself. Why some stories flow like the Mississippi and others meander like a slow creek in August?

At any rate, Fallen Angels, the tavern where the story takes place, is everything to me with this story. The rural route road, the big gravel parking lot and the forgotten shuffleboard table along the back wall. In my wilder days, days I’m not proud or ashamed of, I used to frequent several places that had many similarities to that fictional bar. The hybrid of those places I went to would be Fallen Angels. I might have known the equivalent of Jesse, an absolute monster with the same first name. I might have known a few guys like Dumpy and some girls like Leesa too. There were maybe a fair share of disagreements that I might have had out back from time to time.

One summer, the real Jesse just stopped showing up at the bar where he worked. Nobody ever knew what happened to him. He probably just drifted on, nothing dramatic, so I just took the liberty of filling in some more interesting details. Frankly though, the story of Big Cat and even it’s outcome, was probably not all that much of a stretch.

Jim J. Wilsky

Jim Wilsky is a central Illinois native with a lifelong passion for writing and storytelling. He has written short stories in the genres of mainstream, suspense, crime, westerns, and historical fiction. His work has appeared in A Twist of Noir, Yellow Mama, Darkest Before The Dawn, Plots With Guns, Powder Burn Flash, Mystercial-E, The Medulla Review, Hardluck Stories and others, including several print anthologies.