Finding Your Next Story

My part of the world, eastern Massachusetts, is in the midst of a rough winter, with snow banks six feet high and more storms on the way. But life doesn’t come to a halt, not if you have a dog. While I was out walking our lab during the worst of the storm an idea for a story took shape. Those high snow banks along the street or in the yard by the garage are the perfect spot to hide a body. And no one thinks anything of a homeowner out snow-blowing in the middle of the night. The streetlights reflect off the new white snow, but not too much, and windows are shut tight against the cold and any noise.

This is how my stories usually begin, with a sudden awareness of how dangerous the mundane can really be. During my regular visits to South India, I always noted how things were changing and what remained the same. There were always new shops, and that got me thinking. In a story originally published in a Level Best Books anthology, a young woman opens a shop, earning her own money and new independence. This doesn’t sit well with some members of her family, and she soon ends up dead, in “The Secret of the Pulluvan Drum.”

The first book in the Anita Ray series grew out of my first breakfast in a new hotel/guesthouse. I was still exhausted from my trip to India (twenty-plus hours on a plane) and too tired and jet-lagged to make small talk. I listened half-awake to the other guests at the family-style dining table, and was struck by how casual comments could be and yet carry threads of danger. How could it be that so many of the guests were from the same part of the United States but didn’t know each other? And why was one so hostile to one stranger but not another? This is the opening of Under the Eye of Kali, the first Anita Ray mystery novel.

During the summer months I waste a lot of time trying to rid my garden of invasive species, especially Lily of the Valley. I once stood in front of a large side garden taken over by the poisonous flower, and marveled that something so dangerous could be such an ordinary fact of life. That became a key feature in a short story featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva and posted on Wattpad as “Bad News with a Touch of Class.”

It’s a truism that the world is a dangerous place, but for a writer, it’s a reminder of the truth that opportunity is everywhere. Good stories come out of turning the mundane on its head, seeing past the surface, and asking, What if?

For these and other works by Susan Oleksiw, go to

http://www.amazon.com/Susan-Oleksiw/e/B001JS3P7C

A Writer's Advice: Write what you . . .

The first advice most writers get is the cliché “Write what you know.” This seems to be safe advice because, after all, if you’re writing about something you know, you are less likely to make a fool of yourself or sound embarrassingly ignorant. But it can also be frustrating to the beginning writer. No one wants to write about a family that seems boring or that is painfully dysfunctional.

A few months ago I had an idea for a story that surprised me. A divorced man finds himself alone in a large house with a life not of his making. His wife has left him the trappings of a life he doesn’t know how to live—she was an avid sailor, for one thing, and he did little more than pick up the sail bags and follow her out to the boat. He took orders when she gave them, and otherwise sat in the cockpit and watched the waves. He had little or no idea what she did to make the boat “go.” Now that he’s alone, he finds himself the owner of a boat, books about boats, and the reputation of being a good crew on a racing boat. He hardly knows who this person is. The story grew from there.

It has been almost over 45 years since I was in a sailboat or raced one. I could barely remember the terms for things, racing rules, and all the rest, but the story appeared, and I started writing. If someone had told me I should write about sailing, I would have dismissed him or her with a laugh and an off-hand comment.

A few years ago I had just returned from India after an absence of many years, and ran into an old family friend. There was something different about her, and I didn’t know what it was until an hour later, after we had parted company. She had walked away to her car, and I kept seeing that image of her walking away. Then I remembered. She’d been born with a bone deformity in the 1940s, and lived with it almost her entire adult life, until she reached her forties, when someone told her the deformity could be “fixed.” I know next to nothing about medicine and not a lot about life in an Indian village (I lived in a city when I was there), but I began to see a young woman in a village in India born with a deformity that a visiting western doctor says he can “fix.”

One day several years ago I ran out of typing paper. This led to a search (before the big box office supply stores) on Saturday morning for paper. That led to an encounter with a paper salesman, which was the genesis for the fourth Mellingham mystery, Friends and Enemies, featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. The story revolves around the loyalty employees feel for the paper industry, and after I finished researching it for the story, I understood their commitment to their individual companies.

If I only wrote what I knew, these and other stories wouldn’t have been written. If new writers ask (and only if they ask) for advice I tell them, “Write what you love” or “Write what you’re curious about” or “Write what you think you need to learn about life.” But whatever you write about, stretch yourself. Go somewhere new in your imagination.