"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.
HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: Dave White: WITNESS TO DEATH.
It all started with James Bond.
I’m a huge James Bond fan. I’ve read all the Fleming novels—save THE SPY WHO LOVES ME, but including THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN—and seen all the movies multiple times. So much so that I can quote the really awful lines in MOONRAKER. My favorite is, “Mr. Bond, you appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.” And it’s lines like that which inspired WITNESS TO DEATH.
In fact, I think the first tickle at the back of my brain came when I saw DIE ANOTHER DAY. The first hour of DAD is great. Dark, smarmy, action packed. The last half is… well, let’s not talk about it. And I thought—I want to do better. I want to write a James Bond novel.
So, I tried. Not to actually write a James Bond novel, there are way too many legal troubles or fan fiction stigmas that go along with that. But I tried to write a spy novel, one that had the fun and wit of a Bond movie. That roller coaster ride feel. Great stunts, hot girls, save the world at the last minute. You know the drill.
And it wouldn’t come.
I couldn’t get the feel right. Something was missing from the story. I put it away for a long time. And then I visited Washington DC for the first time ever. It was on my February break from school—I’m a teacher—and I was awed by the city. Loved the WWII Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The grandness of it all, the majesty.
But it was the Spy Museum where it all started to come together. There are more spies in Washington DC then anywhere else in the world. And I started thinking… what if a teacher got mixed up in all that, somehow? What if a teacher got mixed up with a James Bond type?
And I had my story. There are some very Bond-eque ideas in the story. Bond always seems to move from a city, to a resort, to a desolate area. In my story, the characters end up in New York City, the Poconos, and New Jersey. There are ruthless killers, and beautiful women. Maybe even one in the same.
But it really isn’t a Bond story. It’s a thriller with moments I haven’t seen elsewhere. It’s got character, heart, and emotion.
But it all came from loving Bond. And memorizing a really bad line.
Dave White is the Derringer winning author of THE EVIL THAT MEN DO, WHEN ONE MAN DIES and a new collection, MORE SINNED AGAINST. You can find him at Do Some Damage.
A Day at the Zoo.
How I Came to Write This Book
Anyone who's ever seen the movies Best in Show or Little Miss Sunshine know that shows and contests can get pretty cutthroat. And to an onlooker it can seem funny if the participants' struggles for perfection turn neurotic or obsessive. I take things one or two steps further in Slugfest, the fourth title in my Dirty Business mystery series and the action is set at a northeast flower show where more than just the plants are dying.
As a long-time volunteer at the legendary Philadelphia Flower Show I've had access to much behind-the-scenes information. I've seen the empty, airplane hangar-like convention center turn into a tropical paradise or an undersea garden in a matter of days. I've also seen some fairly hysterical behavior similar to that seen in the two movies I mentioned. Not wanting to incriminate or kill off any of my pals at the Philly Flower Show I created the fictional Big Apple Flower Show where there are so many mishaps exhibitors are starting to jokingly refer to it as the Javits Curse, but the laughter stops when one body is found at the foot of an unused escalator and another floating in the river. My amateur sleuth Paula Holliday accidentally holds a crucial clue to solving both murders and another, if she doesn't figure out who's taken off the gardening gloves and turned this genteel flower show into a slugfest.
Writers of traditional mysteries are frequently asked how they can marry humor with murder - after all, real crime isn't funny. It isn't. But people are. And they don't stop being who they are when bad things happen. (I swiped that line from none other than Carolyn Hart, who knows a thing or two about writing mysteries.) Even the most notorious villains in literature have delivered zingers. Think of Hannibal Lecter's "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti." How much less chilling would it have been if he'd just said "I ate his liver"? Black humor to be sure, but still very funny.
There are no Hannibals and no cannibals in the Dirty Business books just an amateur sleuth drawn into sometimes challenging and dangerous situations armed with nothing more than her smarts, her sense of humor and the occasional power tool.
Rosemary Harris' debut novel Pushing Up Daisies was nominated for both the Anthony and the Agatha Award for Best First Novel 2008. Others in the series are The Big Dirt Nap, Dead Head and Slugfest (April 2011.) They've been called "a wild and funny ride" Crimespree Magazine, "hilarious" Kirkus Reviews and " the perfect summer read" NPR (CT.)
Visit Rosemary on facebook and at www.rosemaryharris.com
HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY
by Matthew C. Funk
Unlike many of my characters, Stagger Lee didn’t sneak into my stories. He was no crossbreed of literary theme and plot device. He shouldered open the door and just started talking in an outdoor voice. Reality has a way of doing that.
I’ve never met Stagger, but the other day he called my friend. On account of her sleeping late, he left a message:
“If you’re working on your beauty sleep,” rushed the gravely bluegrass voice, “it ain’t happenin’. Call me.”
Half of the swaggering, country boy outlaw that roams my Stagger Lee stories is just an homage to the legend of the blues song—a tall tale figure fueled by impulse and driven by cunning that, in New Orleans fashion, I slipped across racial lines from black to white when I placed him in my favorite city.
The other half of my Stagger Lee actually filled those boots and walked that tall. The more felonious of Stagger’s stories are just drama of my own warped invention, but many of them were lived and suffered and laughed over by a real dude. I get them secondhand and decades old from our mutual friend, but they burn so damn bright I have to give them their due and brand a blank page with them.
Stagger Lee is the soul of the South for me, and that soul lives in a flesh-and-blood fellow. We’ll call him Davey. But make no mistake—though he may not share a name with the original African-American folk anti-hero, he’s a legend to his friends.
My Stagger Lee gets his background from Davey in many ways.
Davey floated between the upper-crust, white-tie world of the Kentucky Derby’s box-seat set and the underworld of East Kentucky good old boys who buried bullion in the acreage of their hillside shacks. He dined with pink-tanned golfers at the Lexington Club one evening and laid traps in his farmhouse the next. He outfoxed, out-charmed and outran the law on many occasions and never was turned away from a party with sterling silver settings on the table.
I also got a fistful of Stagger Lee’s stories from Davey. Stagger’s bravado in the face of danger comes from Davey’s easy bravery in the face of angry, gun-toting hillbillies. Stagger’s outsized generosity—like in my upcoming novel, City of NO, when he bought up scores of sets of silverware for his friends in Jamaica because he’d heard they had a shortage down there—is inspired by Davey’s actual purchases. Davey threw the first punch for the sake of his friends, Davey fell prey to painful pratfalls with the same devil-may-care attitude and Davey partied like he was in a drinking contest with the Gods.
That’s all pure Stagger Lee, because to me, it’s pure southern—a stretch of country that still lives as if thought comes from flesh, not from high ideals or dusty pages.
I invent a lot based on this schematic of the southern spirit. Davey walked too tall to be confined to one group of people, but Stagger breaks the bounds of reason and decency like the song that inspired his name. Where Davey would swing a fist, Stagger would pull a gun. While Davey kicked back with a questionable element, Stagger thrives as its beating heart. Davey may have skirted the law, but Stagger lives at war with it.
My Stagger Lee, as my newly completed rough manuscript about him defines, is the model of the ancient hero in modern cast—the hero that endures and inflicts terrific suffering solely for his own ends—the original hero of human kind, the outlaw hero. Davey is the outlaw spirit, the outlaw voice, the source of wit and wild tales that his friends still can’t keep bridled in and have to let gallop out of them.
In many cases, I’m sad to know my stories come from real people and real events. It’s a sense of duty to cast some light on where they’re suffering out of sight that compels me. In the case of Stagger Lee, I have a story that makes me smile almost every time.
Part of my joy is the appeal of Stagger Lee as an unchained ego. Call him Stagger or Hercules or Peter Pan, the outlaw superman draws us in because there’s an adolescent in us that never grew up—that still wants to kick down doors and knock about the china shop of civil society, breaking speed limits and sacred cows.
The other part of my joy comes of knowing that such a man lived so wild and came out of it with a smile on his face too.
It lets me rest easier under the mire of routine and hypocrisy and materialism to know that those constraints are just as mythical as Stagger Lee—that a dude can go through his entire adult life without working a day and still end up richer in a way than the rats in their race.
I’m glad Stagger Lee is alive in Davey. It reminds me that there’s a whole lot more to being alive than making a living.
Legends are true. Some of us come alive through them. Some bring them to life.
Matthew C. Funk won the 2011 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story on the Web. TIMES PAST was featured at Alec Cizak's top All Due Respect.
