Pretty much my whole writing life, I have been drawn to trying to write stories that have something to do with murder. As you can guess, I have no experience with this subject – only exposure through books, television, and movies. I don’t even really know anyone in law enforcement of any kind, or even remotely related to law in any way. They always say write about what you know. I say this to my writing students all the time. Historically, I have been terrible at following this rule for myself.
In freshman year of high school, the first short story I wrote that ever got really good feedback was (I’m sure) truly terrible. I think out of embarrassment I have blocked out the details, but it had something to do with an up-and-coming lawyer whose pregnant wife gets murdered and he has to tie the details together to solve the crime himself. There’s a weird scene with a movie theater and a ransom note that I can’t quite recall. The timeline makes no sense. The legal details make no sense. My teacher must have wanted to kill herself while she read it. She gave me an A, probably because she saw some glimmer of hope in what I had produced, but it must have been hard to find.
Then, during Sophomore year, I wrote a lurid tale called “Revenge” which was about two kids who were home alone for the weekend. Their father is a prosecuting attorney who put someone in jail for something as prosecutors will do. That someone is now out of jail and wants – you guessed it – revenge. He subsequently breaks into their house in the night, and ties up the older brother in the basement. The sister, being the quick-thinking, badass type, uses a dumbwaiter (yes, I said dumbwaiter) to sneakily lower herself into the basement and plan a surprise knife attack on the suspect. She is stabbed in the process, but once they have knocked out the perpetrator, they flee to the neighbors who call for help and they all lived happily ever after. It ends with one of the most horrible endings in history, with a scene of the brother and sister in the hospital (for the stab wounds of course) calling their parents to tell them, “We had a little problem tonight….” or something terribly un-clever like that which doesn’t make any sense at all and would make you cringe if you read it.
Fast forward to 2015 to 33-year-old me who is still consistently torn about what kind of writer I want to be. I write poetry pretty plentifully, but have yet to grapple onto something larger than poems, short narrative memoir-like pieces, or short stories. I have always wanted to write a novel, but there is always that part of me that regresses back to my child-like need for a crime-thrilling plot that has a perfectly resolved ending that surprises the reader. It has many times paralyzed me as a writer throughout my life. For the last five years or so, I have been writing much more under the philosophy of “finding” my ending as I go, which does free me up in a lot of ways to let characters and ideas find me – and find me they have. But endings still never seem to find me – or follow through of any kind really.
Tonight, I sat with my sister in the living room printing out a small selection of the characters and story beginnings I have gathered over the last few years – stories that come to me out of nowhere, or from a prompt, or from a story I heard in real life. I have a lot of beginnings. Beginnings that go nowhere because I can’t see their ending, or even figure out how they might eventually have one. My sister was helping me to get a little more concrete with some of these stories, or to come up with an idea that might become a larger-scale project for me, because she knows how much I would like to make this happen. We were brainstorming, and she said jokingly, “So there’s this pizza guy.” I laughed long and hard, because when my sister, Andy, and I were younger, we used to come up with these intricate plot ideas for stories we were going to write. The stories were little projects we would invent spur of the moment, especially in the summer when we were bored and in need of something to do. The pizza guy, was one such little project – or it almost was.
We stayed up well into the night one summer after we decided we were really going to dig in and write a book. Our concept was a pizza guy who is framed for murder because he is delivering a pizza to a house where a murder is taking place. Sounds groundbreaking, I know. Well, he might have been accidentally pinned for the murder, or he might have been purposefully framed for the murder – I don’t know. The details are hazy after all these years. But, we had maps, character sketches, the whole nine yards. We were basically staging a production, drawing character movements within a kitchen we created and sketched. We tried to figure out timing, and how the case would unfold for the reader. There are always moments of brilliance in these sessions, where you would think you have the whole story tied up in a neat little bow and that it’s all going to come together. Then, within minutes, a question is raised that brings the whole thing tumbling down again. We never made that story work. We quit when sleepiness set in, and that project got brushed aside as so many others have as well along the way.
Tonight felt a lot like that night in our parents’ kitchen so many years ago where we mapped out a crime scene for the pizza guy. I have some scenes I have written from a concept I’m developing, and my sister – my idea assistant for many years now – helped me to try to map out how everything can fit together. It’s a slow process, and a painful one for me at times. I am still learning to find the balance between being unable to write until the whole story is exactly planned out, and going in blind with no ending or direction in mind. I don’t know if I’ll ever find the perfect balance. But one thing I am determined to do is to stop being someone who never finished anything I start – and to stop being that person who says they want to write a book, and never does. Many times tonight when the ideas had gaps and the story needed some rethinking, I found myself saying, “Nope, this concept isn’t going to work.” My sister kept telling me to shut up, basically. She was right. I am going to write my ass off this year. I need to shut up that little voice in my head that says a story is going nowhere and give it a chance. I need to let it try to be something, before it’s just nothing – like the pizza guy.
