I was asked to speak to a local service club by a friend.
“What do you want me to talk about?”
“Well, since all we’re giving you is breakfast and a
complimentary ink pen, I suppose you could talk about anything you want. But what I’d really like you to tell us is where
you get ideas for your stories.”
I thought it over for about five seconds. I know who’s in that club and like them all.
“OK, I’ll come talk to your club. You still meeting terribly early at that
church?”
“Yeah. Be there at
7:00 if you want breakfast. We try to
get the speaker on by 7:30.”
“OK. I’ll see what I
can work up about my stories.”
My friend’s question is a cousin to another that comes up at
times from people who hear about my blog.
“What’s your blog about?”
“Anything I want.”
They look puzzled. Most
blogs are written around a topic of some kind.
I’m expected to say that my blog is about the outdoors, cooking, music, travel,
politics – some subject they might care about.
Instead, I write in the first person about things that
happen in my life. The only constant is that
I write my blog in a shack in my backyard.
Thus, the blog’s name, Dave in
the Shack. But that offers readers
no clue as to where ideas for my stories come from. I would need to talk about something else.
These local clubs have changed considerably. Breakfast is the same as forty years ago, but nearly
half the members that morning were women. They didn’t
sing together from a club songbook and they skipped the prayer (said it was the club president’s prerogative). Still said the pledge though, facing a tiny American
flag.
“At the end of my career as the director of a not-for-profit
agency, I developed some health problems that got me thinking about early
retirement. At that time, I was writing a
weekly blog about the agency and its work that had a widespread and varied
audience. It was my favorite task as
director. That’s not true. It was all I wanted to do.
Before leaving the job, I took a weekly writing course at UIC
Chicago called Creative Nonfiction. There I met a talented professor and writer,
Brooke Bergan, and students like me who loved to write. Sometimes you get lucky. I found out creative nonfiction was what I’d
been writing since I was a kid.
What is creative nonfiction? It’s writing that uses creative ways to retell a true story. Creative nonfiction writers don't just share accounts of life’s events, they use craft and technique to bring readers into their personal lives. When it works readers hear the writer’s voice, imagine the settings they describe, and feel what the writer experiences. Aside from opinion essays, my blog posts are rooted in things that really happen. But I don’t limit myself only to what happens.
For example, I write a lot of dialogue. We can’t remember everything we say to others
word for word or what others say to us. So,
I make the dialogue more interesting by writing what I think I had said, might
have said, or wished I had said. I also put
words into the mouths of the real people in my stories.
We don’t talk like we write.
And we don’t always say interesting things in conversation that later read
well. So, I jazz it up to make the
dialogue reveal more.
To explain where I get ideas for my stories, here’s a new story
I got from a memory, sometimes shared orally with family but never written, until a
few days ago. It’s a farm story based on
something that really happened within my family.
I grew up on a small dairy farm between Bloomington and
Pekin. All around us were families
living on small farms. The men who worked
those farms worked alone, or with family, except for jobs like shelling corn
and baling hay when they traded labor with neighbors. It was a pretty solitary life and perhaps
because of that those farmers were often quiet guys. Unlike their wives. But that’s another story.
Farm families around Danvers in the 50’s and 60’s were conservative and church-going. Where I lived they were mainly protestant. Few of them drank alcohol, and if they did, they kept it to themselves. Or in the barn. There were farmwives in Danvers who bragged about never having beer in their refrigerators or whiskey in their cupboards. Our neighbors hardly even swore. I think of that life as the definition of clean living. Hypocritical at times, polite to a fault, but clean all the same.
This story involves me playing basketball for Danvers High School, a small school attended by just over 100 kids. We were playing at Armington, which had even less students than us. At those little schools, if you had even one kid with a decent jump shot you had a chance to win. I was not that kid. My role was getting rebounds and giving the ball to my teammates who could score.
Mom and Dad saw all my home games and some out of town when they weren’t so far away that they couldn’t milk the cows and still get to the game on time. Armington was close, just past Waynesville, and my parents were there.
Mom and Dad sat in the bleachers a few rows behind the
scorer’s table. There weren’t many rows
of bleachers to begin with. Those towns
had tiny loud gyms and Armington’s was packed.
Each team had its own scorer. With them at the table was the timekeeper who ran
the game clock. Timekeepers were usually
hometown volunteers or a hometeam schoolteacher.
The score was close, time was running out in the fourth quarter, and Armington was just a few points behind.
Armington’s coach took a time out and when the referee put
the ball back into play, the timekeeper forgot to start the game clock. Or he did it on purpose to give Armington
more time to score. My Dad yelled at the
timekeeper.
“Hey, how about starting the clock?”
The timekeeper did start the clock, but then turned around
and said this to my Dad.
“Hey, how about kissing my ass?”
Dad didn’t respond. I’m
sure he was shocked anyone would say that, in public or otherwise, especially
to a stranger. And Dad was not good with
witty comebacks. He was deliberate and
thoughtful. I always figured that came
with the job. All those hours alone in
the field on a tractor, back and forth, going over things in your mind,
thinking everything through.
I was in the game when all this happened and didn’t hear it.
Mom and Dad told me all about it when I got home. In small towns incidents like that became
stories later told and retold in the barber shop and the beauty parlor. Dad was either embarrassed, amused, or ashamed
by the whole thing. I couldn’t
tell. He didn’t let on. But, a couple nights later, I heard him
talking to himself.
We had a big two-story farmhouse with an upstairs
bathroom. Mom and Dad slept downstairs,
and the kids’ rooms were all on the second floor. My room was right across from the bathroom
with the head of my bed parallel to an open doorway.
I was the baby of a blended family of seven kids. By the time I was in fourth grade, all my
siblings were out of the house. It was
just me up there.
When Dad came upstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of
the night, he was either smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette as he climbed
the steps or lit one while he sat on the toilet. Sometimes the smell of the smoke woke me
up. Sometimes I heard his Zippo lighter
click open, followed by the sound of the thumb wheel scraping the flint, and ending
with a snap when the shiny case shut.
I didn’t let him know I was awake. He never turned on the light or shut the door. If there was any moonlight at all and I
opened one eye I could see the outline of his head above the vanity, sitting
there on the stool, the sky behind him in the bathroom window. If not, I saw only the tip of his cigarette
glowing orange in the dark. Either way, he
thought he was alone.
That night I smelled cigarette smoke, then heard his
voice. He spoke softly, half
whispering.
“Hey, how about starting the clock?”
He was replaying the words he said to the timekeeper in
Armington. He didn’t repeat the
timekeeper’s response, but this time, unlike that night at the game, he had a
comeback to that startling request he couldn’t forget.
“Hey, how about doing your job and keeping your mouth shut?”
He paused. I saw the end of his Camel glow as he took a draw
and then heard him exhale. He thought of
another response and tried it out in the dark.
“Hey, how about you kiss MY ass buddy?”
My Dad would never say either of those things to a stranger in
real life. I wished he could have, but
he was not that kind of man. Alone though,
in the middle of the night, he boldly imagined it.
If he had been a writer of creative nonfiction he could have,
if he wanted, gone beyond the actual dialogue to make it a whole exchange
between him and the timekeeper. It was a
real event, it happened, and he remembered it vividly. That night in the Armington bleachers there
were things Dad might have said, things he wished he’d said, and things he
could have written later that would have made his story more compelling.
But he didn’t. And that
is not going to happen now, because Dad was born in 1909 and would be 115 in
December. He lives on now only in his
family’s memories and some of my stories.
So, the answer to where I get my stories is that I get them
from real life and jazz them up, like I did this one. My hope and my reward are that my readers
enjoy them. Thanks to my friend for
asking.”
