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Whose story is this anyway? 

7/16/2015

7 Comments

 
Picture
British soldiers watching a boxing match on a troop ship traveling from England to North Africa, 1943. Photo by Robert Capa
So I'm working on a new short story. The second novel is taking a back seat to other things in life. With three kids, let's be honest, the second novel is in the trailer for now. It should be thankful it made it in, this blog apparently, got left on the side of the road! 
Anyway,  I need to write every once in a while to keep my writing wits about me, to make sure I know more words than "Stop fighting you guys!" and I'm finding it easier to put down a couple hundred words of a short story every few days, rather than a couple hundred words of a novel, I guess because it's nice to feel like I'm making some kind of progress.  And, so far,  I'm happy with the progress and the writing. The idea for the story came to me a few weeks ago and I've had no trouble (yet) getting pretty decent stuff on paper. I'm almost halfway through. The problem I have is this: some of what I'm writing comes from pretty real life stuff, and I don't mean the news. 
I won't play coy like some writers do. I most definitely have put a real person into my writing. More than once. My grandma is a pretty major character in Fathom Lines--names changed/artistic license and all that. She might not have recognized herself, but the way I knew her, my essence of her, it's there. I never worried about her reaction because I knew she'd never read it (I wasn't playing the odds -- she actually told me that she'd never read it.)
This time, it's not a real person that I'm putting into this short story, it's a real situation, and I'm not sure how much of it is my story to tell. 
I know I'm being very vague. That's basically all discussions had with a writer about their work ever. Sorry. The best I can do is if you think about it like this: if my story is about a boxing match, I wasn't throwing the punches, but I was close enough to get blood on my shirt. And I don't want to write the eyewitness account. I want to write it like I was in the ring. What do you think? Write it anyway? Scrap it? Write it and hide it in a drawer? 
7 Comments

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