The STORY INSIDE

by Leigh Lundin

In some ways, this is a companion piece to John Floyd’s column from yesterday. His flowchart caught my eye, a remnant of our common past as software engineers, a past we share with a guy named David Wroblewski.

Sharon, editor, writer, teacher, and my friend Steve’s girlfriend invited me to dinner yesterday for a 4th of July celebration, on condition that I do the grilling. My skill has less to do with Boy Scout training and more to do with Lawry’s Garlic Salt and eleven other herbs and spices. Perhaps that’s true of all cooks.

Sharon saves writing articles and magazines for me that I’d fail to catch on my own. She’d saved Tuesday’s book section of USA Today that featured two articles about The Story of Edgar Sawtelle‘s author, David Wroblewski, a 48-year-old software engineer. He is quoted saying, "Designing software is every bit as creative as writing fiction. I’ll always make software."

His words were similar to my own when people questioned my jump from software design to scratching out fiction. My good friend, Thrush, often shakes his head in bemusement and a little sadness that I left the Order of Software Giants to write fiction.

In truth, I sometimes feel the same way. I was an outstanding software designer, well within the top 100 world-wide. Thrush and I designed software that touched most of Western (and some non-Western) Civilization. These days software products are team efforts with little room for lone code-slingers like us, even if America hadn’t given our software away to India. So in a way, I didn’t leave software design; software left me.

However, that living seed of creativity has to sprout. I’d always wanted to write fiction, and inner creativity found its way into stories. I feel a systems software background has made me acutely aware of structure in plotting, what we call ‘architecture’.

Inside You

I find myself giving advice to other new writers, sometimes because they ask and sometimes because I volunteer. I’m the least experienced writer here, but what makes me useful is that I’m not an expert. Being only a rung or two ahead, it’s easy for me to reach back and assist someone, finding it easier than, say, Stephen King, who’d have to reach back 40 rungs to give someone a boost.

After the torrential floods in the Midwest, I phoned high school and college classmates, Sue and Bud Kincaid. Bud is a hell of an engineer, a graduate of Rose-Hulman which is like dropping the name ‘Harvard’ in business circles. Bud once worked for Cummins Diesel which manufactures the best engines on the planet and his wife is the executive administrative assistant to a Cummins vice president. You might not think engineering is a creative enterprise, but you’d be surprised.

Bud confided he’d love to write, but worried if he was limited to "writing what he knew", he wouldn’t have anything to write about. I told him we all have stories to tell; he just didn’t know it.

On Criminal Brief, we’ve mentioned a rule of thumb that a writer takes about ten years to become readable and a little bit more to be publishable, so if you want to write, start now! A few are blessed with writing ability out of the gate, but very few. ‘Spinning a story’ becomes easier with practice, but it helps to have a skewed way of looking at the world.

Understand: You do have stories in you; you simply may not know it.

Bud’s Story

Bud and I read the same authors. Take John Grisham’s The Firm. Unlike Ludlum and Clancy’s characters, the hero’s just an average guy in an average job who gets sucked into a violent situation. I like those stories a lot. I admire Dick Francis, a master of the average guy doing the extraordinary to survive.

I described to Bud a story using his own setting and his own persona. It was easy, because Bud is smart, resourceful, reliable, rugged, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s almost as good looking as I am. If Bud will pardon me for sharing the conversation, this is a sample story we threw together:

Imagine a character who works in an Indiana diesel engine plant that produces the best engines in the world. Throughout the story, you learn about his family, his job, and his problems that make him real. You grow to like him not because he can fly a helicopter or speak fifteen languages, but because he’s an honest, hard-working guy who loves his family and tries to do right even though he screws up sometimes.

One day, the brakes of his company car fail. He’s able to stop safely, but a fitting in his brake line is loose. Vibration? At home one evening, his window’s shot out, just missing him. He and police think it’s a random shooting, probably kids, although later they discover the slug is a modified round from a sniper rifle. Then one Sunday, his neighbor borrows his car, is hijacked and killed.

By now, our employee, though shocked, finds this too much coincidence. He starts taking precautions and begins investigating. Whoever is doing this knows the car our protagonist drives and where he lives, but apparently not what he looks like. That suggests whoever wants him dead is contracting from a distance and/or doesn’t know what he looks like. Is his company car a clue? Could his job have something to do with it?

If so, why? Last year, when the Army shipped Humvees back from Afghanistan to study how heat, dust, and sand affected the engines, he’d stumbled upon half a ton of refined opium hidden in the vehicles. But no, surely not. That was more than a year ago. However… the Army plans to return another batch of Humvees for study. Could that have something to do with it?

He recalls another possibility. He’d revealed recent suspicions of Chinese espionage to his kiss-ass kick-ass boss. Our ordinary hero thought a Chinese company was trying to steal plans of his radically new ‘green’ turbine design featuring high-efficiency / low-pollutants. Could that have anything to do with the attacks? Particularly since his boss called in sick a week ago and hasn’t been heard from since?

Our man phones his wife, but can’t reach her on her cell. He tries several times thoughout the day. He’s not worried; she’s probably at the beauty parlor. Then he receives an eMail that chills his blood…

Did you say you didn’t have a story?

Best Suggestions

• Sign up for a writing class.
• Join (or form) a writing group to be critiqued.
• Grow a tough hide. It helped that I quickly learned to depersonalize criticism and even welcome it. Some potentially good writers give up because they can’t take criticism.
• Keep reading the stuff you like.
• Practice on short stories. Some claim shorts are more difficult, but I think of them as smaller canvases.

Natural Resources

I’m envious that my friends Thrush and Bud have access to terrific resources. Thrush’s niece is a real-life ‘Lucy’ who works as an FBI agent. Bud and Sue’s son has an Indiana University degree in criminal justice and is a private ‘lead’ investigator for Research Consultants Group in a Chicago suburb. Use your resources where you find them!

Tip o’ the Mornin’

If Joanna Bourne ever asks me to write a blurb, I’ll etch her one in gold leaf. Her blog is easy for mystery writers to miss since she writes historical romance. Every so often she includes what she calls "Tech Tops", meaning technical topics.

They’re chaotic as hell, almost as if she talks to you while cooking dinner, tying a shoelace, feeding dogs, and wiping a kid’s nose. However, her columns have more relevance than most books on the subject of writing.

I struggle every day to smooth my prose, strengthen my words, and leave out verbal tics. A few minutes with Joanna reminds me of how far I’ve come and how far I have to go.