Why we can't have nice things

To avoid spoiling the storyline, I won’t comment on this video until after the break. Zoom in full-screen and please, please watch. Please.

 

 

 

 

© www.SandyHookPromise.org

 

Absolutely chilling. As September peeks over the horizon, schools across North America are either already in full session or will begin classes within two tweets of a teacher’s tablet. No one wants to think of the horrifying scenarios played out in too many schools, but think we must. Click below to discover the clues.

My First Story

First story I recall telling happened in 1^st Grade. I didn’t plan a tall tale, nor did I intend to entertain anyone, only myself. As mentioned back on Criminal Brief, our teacher, Miss Ruth, who’d been in place since the War of 1812, taught the dangers of gossip and rumors in a Game of Telephone, aka Telegraph aka Game of Whispers.

She paraded us down to the gymnasium, where we took off our shoes. Lining us up alphabetically in a row, she seated us on the floor. Then she explained the plan: Teacher would whisper a short story to Sara Arnett, who would in turn would whisper to Roger Batton beside her, and so on across the row, passing through me, dead center in the middle. Mike Young, seated last, would hear the final iteration. Finally, Sara and he would stand and deliver what they heard, Versions 1.0 and 1.16, so to speak, thus we could grasp how inaccurate rumors were.

The story took a few minutes to reach me, a tale about a wee bonnie bunny on a bicycle. At that moment, lightning struck and Igor babbled in my ear.

I’ve always been a mad scientist. It dawned on me I could run a double experiment. I related a story to Walter Meyers about an ice-skating ducky with an umbrella. Snap. Bunny Version 1.8 ended and Ducky Version 2.0 came to life, moving on and on.

Then I panicked. What if the teacher did a trace-back? Had I just sinned, lied in some way? Surely worse than lying, what if they kicked me out of school? Forever? What if no one hired me, would I skulk on the streets while my classmates ran solar farms and worked at big name companies?

Then Sara and Mike stood. She repeated Story 1.0, after which Michael rattled off Story version 2.16. Poor Miss Ruth looked dumbfounded. With a slightly stunned expression, she mumbled, “I’ve never had this happen before.” Probably wishing she retired half-a-century earlier, she muttered, “Let’s… Let’s go upstairs.”

Without realizing it, I’d just told my first story.

Write What THEY Know

One of the time-worn chestnuts about getting ideas is "write what you know," and many people point out that staying on familiar ground will limit you. Obviously, it depends on what you know. It certainly didn't hurt Tom Clancy, did it? Or maybe Xaviera Hollander. If you have the right experience, you're golden.
The shared experiences some people think are mundane will be fresh if you put YOUR slant on them. And if they're shared experiences, you already touch a shared nerve that will affect many readers.

Everyone has a first job, first day of school, first date, first heartbreak and dozens of other rites of passage. One of the great literary themes is loss of innocence, which fills a lot of the high school literature reading list. "The Girl in the Red Bandanna," which I published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine last spring, revisits a summer job I only held for one night.

I've played guitar since the mid-sixties and one of my favorite stories was inspired by seeing the

Muddy Waters Blues Band when I was still heavily into the Monkees and Paul Revere & The Raiders. My musical world changed that night, but the story has had over 20 rejections and I've run out of places to send it. Oh, well...

Most of my titles are also song titles because Woody Guthrie, my wannabe rock & roller PI, came from meeting a classmate at my high school reunion. She was now a full-time session musician in Detroit. Blood On the Tracks, Woody's first adventure, was a long time coming, but he now appears in four novels and a few short stories, all of which take their names from songs.

My wife insists that Hell is really middle school. WE all have nightmares about it except the kids whose voices never changed, never had a growth spurt, or never went through puberty. Judy Blume is one of many writers who turned the angst into a gold mine. My own Postcards of the Hanging grew out of a scandal that rocked my school senior year.

Bel Kaufman had a huge bestseller recounting a first year of teaching in Up the Down Staircase, and Braithwaite fared nearly as well with To Sir With Love. My own Run Straight Down comes from my teaching, too, but has a little darker perspective.

Several of my friends (well, two. I don't have many) ask when I'm going to write a story revolving around theater. Well, Linda Barnes wrote an amateur sleuth series featuring Michael Sprague as an actor who solved mysteries. She gave the series up because, as she pointed out, if people got killed in every production Sprague joined, eventually nobody would cast the guy anymore. Barnes and I both grew up in Southern Michigan, moved to New England, and taught English and theater. She's younger and taller than I am, and much nicer. She also went back to theater for her standalone The Perfect Ghost a few years ago. If you have any familiarity with Hamlet, you might check it out.

Three days ago, I finished a first draft of my first attempt to use theater as a background for a story. I  only had to look up one detail that I no longer remembered after several years. It was fun to write, too, a refreshing break from my usual rock and blues.

My favorite poster from when I was directing...

Everybody knows something nobody else does. And maybe it's so obvious we don't even know we know it.

Now for the BSP. John Floyd and I both have stories in the newest issue of Mystery Weekly, now available at your favorite website.