Twenty years ago, when one of my relatives was in the midst of a painful divorce, I found myself wondering how children react to their parents' separation. What came to mind was one of those "What if" questions that drive many writers, in this case, "What if a little girl made an inventory of every item in her father's study the day before he moved out of the house?"
I made some notes, wrote drafts, discarded them, and tried again. I was working full-time as a newspaper reporter and the piece sat in my desk drawer, sometimes for years. I wrote other short stories, but always found myself returning to that one.
Many, many drafts later, I finally reached a point where I was willing to send it out. A long list of publications rejected the story, including Redbook, and I can't say I blame them. I knew that it still wasn't good enough. But in my heart, the story never died. I kept at it: reading books about children and divorce, rewriting draft after draft, even asking my businessman brother-in-law to drag a box of his college textbooks out of the attic so I could copy down the titles. And then the fates intervened: A newsroom colleague who had written award-winning fiction suggested that the story ended on page 10 of my 12-page manuscript. I made the cut and then another friend persuaded his agent, for whom short fiction normally wasn't worth peddling, to send it around again. This time, the editors at Redbook liked the story. In August 1991, "Safekeeping" became my first national fiction publication.
I've made my living as a writer for more than 20 years, mainly as a newspaper reporter but also as a freelance magazine writer and writing coach. As a professional writer, most of my stories were pieces that somebody else _ an editor usually _wanted.
But there have been other stories, like "Safekeeping," which taught me more about writing and about myself. They were also commissioned by an editor_ me.
Many people say they want to write, but they don't know what to write about. Looking back at the stories that I am proudest of, I can detect a central fact about each of them. They are pieces that only I could have written. That realization led me to a rule I try to live by: Do the writing only you can do.
Keeping the Faith
How many times have you said to yourself, "That would make a great story," but then let the idea succumb to the doubts that plague most writers? Inspired by Sigmund Freud, novelist Gail Godwin personified these misgivings as a "Watcher at the Gates," and sees her task as a writer to ignore the carping and criticism of the inner voice that tells many of us that we have no talent and that our ideas are worthless. I'm proud of my Redbook story for a variety of reasons, but what makes me feel best is that I never gave up on my idea.
The story ends after Emily, a precocious 12-year-old, has faked an upset stomach to stay home and record every item in the den occupied by her departing father, just as I had imagined it all those years ago.
She imagined making a scrapbook, like the one Mrs. Markham had everyone make of their class trip. She would paste in the list of everything in his den, all the books, the pictures, the furniture. Paste in the pictures she'd taken. Write captions underneath. That way, even if her father took everything away, she would always remember what it looked like. And when he finally came home, she would surprise him. He would return, carrying all his boxes back into the den, and he would try to remember where everything went. He'd be standing there, rubbing his chin, when she walked in with the scrapbook. "Daddy, your books go here. Schoolbooks on the top shelf, paperbacks on the next one. That chair? Put that right over there. No, no, your diploma goes on that wall. Here, let me show you," Emily would say, taking charge.
A friend describes me as "sports-challenged" because I have so little interest in sports. I like to point out that I might care about the World Series or the Super Bowl "if my coach had given me a full uniform when I played Little League."
For years, hearing people laugh when I recounted my comic adventures as an uncoordinated, pint-sized athlete, I used to wonder if it might make a good story, but then the "Watcher" at my gate would whisper, "no one cares" about my life on the bench. That was before I resolved to do the writing only I can do. I sat down and put the anecdotes on paper. On the day Super Bowl XXIX was played, my essay, "Stupor Bowl," appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine. It recalled the days three decades before when "I was small and scrawny, a clumsy flop at tennis, golf, back-yard football, you name it. I lagged behind the pubescent progress of my friends, whose voices were deepening, whose chins were sprouting hairs, who really needed to wear jockstraps."
Silence the watcher at your gate by keeping the faith in your ideas because they are the ones that will set you _ and your stories _ apart.
Dangerous Territories
"We've got the O.J. 911 tapes," the disc jockey promised. "Coming up after these messages."
Like other commuters on this July morning, I was hooked. When the playback finally came over my car radio, I heard Nicole Brown Simpson's voice _ fed-up, frightened, resigned; but that wasn't what brought tears to my eyes. It was the voice in the background__the shouts of a man out of control, choking on contempt and rage. I knew that sound. I had heard it echoing off the walls in our house. I've felt the lump of remorse that screaming at the top of my lungs leaves in the back of my throat and the pit of my stomach. "I have to write about this," I thought. "But I don't want to."
Every writer has a territory, a landscape of experience and emotional history unique to them. Like any landscape, there are safe havens and dangerous places. I could easily write a light-hearted piece about being the father of three girls. But the topic that needed exploring was my darker side: my temper with my kids. The essay I wrote begins with this painful scene:
It's late at night, and I'm screaming at my kids again. Yelling at the top of my lungs at three little girls, lying still and terrified in their beds. Like a referee in a lopsided boxing match, my wife is trying to pull me away, but I am in the grip of a furyI am unwilling to relinquish. "And if you don't get to sleep right now," I shout, "there are going to be consequences you're not going to like."
First published in The Boston Globe Magazine, the essay has been reprinted in the Sunday magazines of the Detroit Free Press and The Hartford Courant and has been selected for an anthology. Some of my friends cautioned me against publishing this piece; people might get the wrong idea about me. But writing it has helped me understand myself and, more important, treat my family better. Judging from the letters and phone calls I've received from readers grateful to see a painful issue in their life aired publicly, it's helped others too. Explore a dangerous region of your writer's territory by writing a piece nobody can write but you.
Letting The Story Speak
It was a dream assignment. The Washington Post Magazineassigned me to write a profile of the first Vietnamese graduate of West Point. Tam Minh Pham was a young man who marched with the long gray line of cadets in 1974, returning home just in time for the fall of his country and six years imprisonment. But his American roommate never forgot him and 20 years later marshaled his classmates to cut through bureaucratic red tape and bring their buddy to America for a new life.
It didn't take much reporting for me to decide that this was a powerful story, worthy of the length of a cover piece. The only problem: The top editor didn't agree and I was advised to keep it short. But when it came time to write, I had trouble holding back. I decided to write the first draft for myself and worry about length later. I began this way:
As usual, bribes loosened the guards' tongues. Another transfer was coming.
But this time, after four years in jungle camps guarded by the North Vietnamese
army, the inmates were going to a prison run by the Cong An, the security
police. When he heard the rumor, Tam Minh Pham knew what to do. For years, he'd
heard the stories about the cruel men in yellow uniforms who took people away in
the dead of night, about the torture, the killings. He waited for the camp to
quiet down and the night air to fill with the scent of cooking fires, and then
he crept out of his bamboo hut to the garden.
That opening scene went on for another 500 words, much too long for the kind of story I knew the editor was expecting. Fortunately, he was willing to take a look. The next day word came back that some changes were needed; the piece, now scheduled for the cover, needed to be longer.
The quickest way to lose editors' interest is to give them something different than expected. At the same time, writers need to let the story speak if they are going to produce stories that break barriers for themselves and their readers.
Tapping Your Private Stock
We were on our honeymoon in Europe, a month-long trip that had already taken us to Germany, Holland and Paris. Now with a week left before we headed home, we were making good on a promise to a friend: to visit the grave of a man we had never met, who had died in a war fought before my wife and I were born. Pfc. John Juba, the half-brother of our friend back home, had died in the 1944 Normandy invasion, but no one in his family had ever seen his grave. Finding it took two train trips, four cab rides, and visits to three cemeteries before we finally stood in front of the marble tombstone in the Brittany countryside where the soldier was buried. In my hand was a bouquet of white roses that an elderly farmer had let us cut from his garden. Beside us stood a man named Donald Davis, the cemetery's superintendent. In "The Young Who Died Delivered Us," the account of our search, I described the moment this way:
The graves at Brittany lie beyond the Wall of the Missing __ 4,313 white crosses and Stars of David lined up on a manicured field like a marching band at halftime. Five varieties of grass keep it green all year round. The cemetery was empty and so quiet we could hear the rain falling on the flower beds bordering the graves...I laid the flowers in front of the cross and knelt to take a picture for his mother.
"Wait." Davis bent down and turned the bouquet around so the flowers faced the camera. "Otherwise, all you'll get is a picture of the stems." Every trade has its secrets.
"Rest in peace, John," I said under my breath.
We are deluged today by what novelist and short story writer A. Manette Ansay ("Sister," "Vinegar Hill" and "Read This and Tell Me What It Says") refers to as "public domain" images and language; clichés, commonplace descriptions and derivative plots that blur any attempts at originality. Draw instead on your individual experiences by tapping the "private stock" of experience, memory, and feeling that is inside you. We all have stories that only we can tell. Search for the particulars, the telling details and observations that give resonance and meaning to your story, that set it apart, and your chances of producing a piece with universal appeal are strong. In my case, the story of that pilgrimage to a soldier's grave has paid off with publication of "The Young Who Died Delivered Us" in six different Sunday newspaper magazines as well as a reprinting in a popular textbook. But most rewarding were the letters from readers who saw themselves in our search. Wrote one man who helped lay out the cemetery where John Juba is buried: "You seem to have caught the feelings experienced by us who were there."
Spreading the Word
It was an offhand comment from an interview subject. I was reporting a story for Knight-Ridder Newspapers about guns and children when Mary Steber of Liverpool, N.Y., told me that she and her suburban family had never worried about guns until their 14-year-old son, Michael, was shot to death while watching a football game at a classmate's house. The friend's father, a retired policeman, kept a collection of firearms in an unlocked closet.
"You warn your kids about sex and drugs and alcohol and getting in a car with a stranger," Mrs. Steber said. "Yet guns were never mentioned in our house. We never thought of it as a problem."
Now whenever Michael's siblings visit a new friend, they make a point of reassuring their parents, "Don't worry, they don't have guns."
When I heard that, I thought, "What a great message for parents." Our own daughters have just reached the age of sleep-overs and visits to their friends' homes. Before we let them pay a visit, we started asking parents of our kids' friends, "Do you have guns in your house?"
Almost every day, it seems, the news reports yet another shooting of a child with a gun left unattended. Perhaps the Steber family's common-sense approach, if heeded by enough parents and gun-owners, might save a life. To spread the word, I wrote an essay I called "It's 10 p.m.; Do You Know Where Your Guns Are?" and began sending it around to newspaper op-ed pages. So far, its child-protecting message has reached readers of The Christian Science Monitor, St. Petersburg Times, and The Orlando Sentinel.
Is there a message you think needs to be heard? A story in your "private stock" that needs tapping? A tale that's telling you how it must be written? A dangerous territory worth exploring? An idea you've never lost faith in? Ask yourself, "What's the writing only I can do?" And then do it.
