Has something ever happened in your neighborhood that haunts your stories? Back in the late sixties a couple of miles from where I lived, an elderly woman got out of bed in the middle of the night, walked down the hall to her grown daughter's bedroom, shot her, came back to her own room, killed her husband, then herself. This story haunts me on several levels and mostly because no one ever figured out why she did it.
And the why is probably the reason I keep writing about this story in bits and pieces. What always creeped me out about this story was the fact that the house was right next to a cemetery. My imagination conjures up ghosts and demonic possession. What always surprised me was that one of her sons chose to return and live in the house. Yeah, made me shudder, too.
Another story was that she had cancer and didn't want to leave her husband to fend for himself, but no one could figure out why she killed her daughter. I always thought doing that first, would keep the daughter from stopping her from committing suicide. Or perhaps she was jealous of her daughter's relationship with her husband and didn't trust him enough to leave them alone together when she died. But remembering the times and knowing the women her daughter was friendly with, I've wondered since if the mother found out her daughter was gay and couldn't bear the embarrassment that would bring to the family name.
All sorts of ideas tumble through my brain, bubbling to the top and spilling out on the pages of short stories. One such story is about forty pages long, unpublished, and it's been tugging at me again, begging to be worked on. It's full of ghosts and murders and mother/daughter relationships.
What about you? Is there an old incident that tugs at your memory and slips into your stories or do you just write around those memories, leaving them buried in the past?
4 comments:
I think writing, and exploring thru fiction, is a great way to deal with the past. I forget who it was, but some writer said all writers leave clues about themselves in everything they write. So, it sounds like our own lives are some of the best fields to mine.
I can never try to tell a true story. The truth gets in my way. I can use small incidents but not the whole thing. I do use a lot of stuff from my husband's childhood, much more interesting than mine.
Welcome to The Corner, Frank! And yes, I think a little bit of every writer goes in their work, bits of their lives, how they view the world, the people they'd like to kill but never will ;-) A good place to dig for gold!
I've found that the hardest part of writing a story that's true is getting out of the way and letting the characters talk, Patti. Once the character slips into the story you have to see everything through their eyes instead of your own. One of the reason to only use bits and pieces instead of trying to write the whole thing as it happened.
When I was in college a young girl was murdered with the only witness being a friend who hid. Because the witness was 6, her testimony couldn't be provided in court. This was at a time when DNA wasn't a forensic tool to determine identity of the suspect. A friend who worked on the local police force told me who the suspect was (their occupation--not the name), and he was sorely upset the man couldn't be arrested. The suspect would be watched but after awhile the police would have to stop.
Ideas from actual events have to be treated with care because there is always a factor that someone else who knew about it will read it, and then being the writer: be at risk. I have many stories I heard from cops, or have seen personally, but I don't want to have visitors knocking at my door with no necks, wearing suits three sizes too small with bulges under their armpits.
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