I passed an interesting milestone recently, and it’s made me do some serious thinking.
The milestone?
The thirty-ninth anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday.
If you’re young enough to wonder what that means (or why I would use that phrase to describe my age) … well … the 1960s was the decade of my “coming of age.”
Those of you who are close to my age should certainly remember one of the prevailing mantras of the time …
“Don’t trust anybody over thirty.”
For those of you too young to have heard it … in my day, in the age of Selective Service numbers and the military draft for the Vietnam War debacle, every teenager and early twenty-something knew it.
When I turned thirty I started using the phrase to represent my birthday, in a silly attempt to forestall time.
But this year may have been the last time I ever do that. Saying it that way sounds a whole lot older than just saying my age.
For my latest “anniversary” one of my sons sent me a nice hardcover edition of Stephen King’s excellent treatise ON WRITING and, although I’ve read my dog-eared paperback version of it many times, I sat right down and read it again.
It’s that good.
When writers are told “write what you know” … the best way to do that is exactly the way Stephen King mentions – as broadly and inclusively as possible. I’ve always tried to do that.
Take my first novel, REICHOLD STREET. I grew up in the Vietnam era, so I know a lot of the sentiment of the time. The story made readers feel the things I was talking about, and won a Readers Favorite Gold Medal.
The ghost I talked about in my short story, “Forgiven” didn’t really exist … at least I don’t think so. I’ve never seen it, anyway. But it didn’t stop me from writing about it.
I’ve never seen the devil, either, but I wrote about an encounter with the Beast in my short story, “The Devil and Charlie Barrow.”
Likewise, I’ve never met a talking rock, but I wrote about one in my flash fiction story, “Conversation With a Lonely Island God.”
Those short stories must have struck a chord, because the collection that contains them, ZEBULON, was a 2013 Readers Favorite Silver Medal Winner.
I’m trying to do it again in my new book, BLOOD LAKE, due out early this summer. It’s a historical fantasy/horror story based around a real event from the early nineteenth century … the forced migration of the Cherokee Nation … known as The Trail of Tears.
I wasn’t around in 1838 (although there have been some days in the dead of winter lately when I feel like I could be that old). I was never forced at gunpoint from my home either, but I can write about it because I can understand hardship and fear.
I’m still writing what I know, because I can also read, learn and use my imagination to apply facts to new storytelling.
That’s what I hope you’re doing in your writing, too.
Now, about that “thinking” I said I was doing …
Writing can be hard work. It can take a lot of time. I don’t want to miss out on family and friends … and I won’t.
But passing the thirty-ninth anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday makes me wonder if I have enough time to tell all the stories that are still in my head.
I’m obviously going to have to write faster.
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I looked at the insolent kid staring out of that old black and white photo and saw Kenny Riddle.
Painting With Light 