War Stories and Fairy Tales

If you’ve been reading these blogs and paying attention (there will be an unannounced test one day) you know I am a retired Army officer.  After I retired, or more accurately, shortly before I did, I started on my second career as a writer.  By the time I retired I had written over one hundred short stories and magazine articles and one novel. To be more exact, not only had I written all of those but they had been published and most had been in paying markets, so I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

As a part of this career, I have taught at three different colleges and I speak at, or do workshops at several writer’s conferences every year.  That brings me to the point of this piece of literary dribble.

Two weeks ago, I attended the largest convention of mystery writers, editors, agents and fans in the country, or perhaps the world since there were attendees from several foreign countries.  It was held in St. Petersburg, FL over a four day week-end.  Over 1500 people attended, the great majority of which seemed to be mystery fans. They came to meet and get autographs and photos with their favorite authors.  Publishers were there to give away books and there were so many available that UPS had a room there with a crew that did nothing but pack and ship books.  A smart attendee could get at least a year’s worth of free books for the price of a box and some tape.

There were workshops on every topic a mystery writer or fan could imagine.  Want to poison someone? Need to know how to match fingerprints? Does CSI really look like it does on television?  Thinking of writing a cozy?  Want to work with a co-writer? Need an agent? Publisher?  There were workshops on these and many other topics, but the one I want to talk about is the one I was on.  Military writers.  Not writing military themed books so much, but the panel was made up of writers with a military background.

We had six men on the panel. Four had seen service in Iraq or Afghanistan, one had no combat service and I was the lone Viet Nam veteran.  Get a panel like that and the war stories flew like wild geese in winter.  We had a former SEAL, a Combat Surgeon, a jet pilot, a Navy man who did something I never quite understood and me, the Grunt.  We answered all the questions asked of us and though we did not admit it, we all were waiting for THE QUESTION. “You were in combat.  Did you ever have to take a life?”  Anytime that questions comes up, most people’s tap dancing answer would make Fred Astaire look like a peg-legged duck.  We told war stories.  Funny ones.  Serious ones. A few may have been lies, but that’s the nature of a war story.

And to that point, I will leave you with the age old question.  Do you know the difference between a war story and a fairy tale?  A fairy tale always begins with “Once upon a time.”  A war story always begins with, “Now, this ain’t no shit….”

Wanna Know a Secret?

I’ve Got a Secret was a television show that was on from sometime in the 1950’s until the mid 60’s. It was on mostly in the black and white era of television.  A guest came on, whispered his or her “secret” into the ear of the host and a panel of celebrities no one had ever heard of tried to guess the secret one question at a time.  Get a “yes” to your question and you got to ask another one.  Get a “no” and the guest received a whopping $10.00. The most they could win was $80.00. I give you this as a frame of reference only because I’m certainly not old enough to remember this series. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, but as usual, I digress.

What has an old television series got to do with writing?  Glad you asked.  In my creative writing class or my screenwriting class we discussed how to create a believable character.  All writers have their own system and if they are successful, it would appear that it works. The major thing I like to do is to determine what my character have as a secret and what they fear.

Secrets and fears fuel much of our lives.  The two could very well be the same or related. My youngest daughter was bitten by a black widow spider when she was five years old and we almost lost her. It’s not a secret to the people who know her, but she doesn’t talk about it in normal conversation.  Is she afraid of spiders?  You figure it out. That’s a real fear/secret.  As a writer of fiction, I have to determine what I want my characters to have.

If you have read either of my two series, you may know what they are already, but if not, I’m about to let the Genie out of the bottle because I think I know what they are. You “THINK” you know, you say? Hard to explain unless you’ve been there, but characters tend to take over and let you, the writer, know what they want you to know.  Benjamin Franklin said, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead,” and he was right.

In my Max Maxwell series, the protagonist is playing with fire and he knows it. He is having an affair with a married woman. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances, but the bottom line is she is married and he is not. Therein lies a problem. It’s not a secret to either of them, so what is there to fear? Her husband with a gun? Good answer.  You get $10.00.  Does he care? Next question.

Johnny Morocco served in Italy during WWII. He’s now heavily involved with a woman who came to the US with her family from Italy just prior to the war. Did he meet any of her family when he was in Italy?  If he did, it probably was not good for them.

Is any of this spelled out on the pages of my novel? Not really, but the information is there for the reader to determine the secrets and fears of the characters.

Some secrets are easily shared, just ask little Johnny who came home one day and told his mother he knew that his friend Billy could keep a secret. “How do you know she asked.”  His reply, “Because I pissed in his ear before I told it to him.” Horrified, she asked him to explain. “I leaned down and went ‘pssssttt’ and then I told him.”